I hang out quite often with my Hong Kong, Chinese, and Japanese friends these days, but we have to pause it as finals week is coming up ahead.
Two things that we love doing together: karaoke and shopping! Well, we sort of love the karaoke better. Anyway, Teresa pointed out that there was a cheap karaoke spot down in Homestead road, as I've never been there before (one time my Indonesian friends and I went to another karaoke), I didn't see why not. We even got to go there twice.
So Elda, Sierra, Teresa, and I went there on around early winter quarter, since there weren't loads of assignment to do at that time.
The karaoke's name is Gamba Karaoke, and it's basically a simple Japanese-style karaoke place with a strong Japanese vibe. In fact it's really reasonable, much cheaper than any other karaoke spots to be honest, which only costs $1.00 per hour.
Even the lounge itself was simple and wasn't too big, which I found really nice because the smaller the room gets, the tighter we could all be together without some spaces making a gap among us.
Anyway, here you can take a look at what we were doing, these pictures are taken from our first visit:
The way we picked songs was kind of unique. Unlike any other karaoke spots (or so I thought), where we usually pick out the songs right from the television screen, this is probably the only one I happened to visit that provided an iPad to pick out the songs. Cool huh?
There's something even cooler from this karaoke place.
They have Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese songs! Most of my friends who are Mandarin speakers quickly got themselves some songs to sing. Meanwhile, I was thinking of a Taiwanese song that I used to hear a lot and pretty much liked, before finally I came up with reserving a couple of F4 songs (Gosh how I miss the whole Meteor Garden euphoria, back in the days where people on the streets hummed the soundtrack).
One of the F4 songs that came up first was "Baby" (I'm pretty sure that's the name, because the chorus only went 'Oh baby baby baby, my baby baby'). I was ready with the microphone and all of my friends had anticipated for me to sing, before suddenly, a bunch of lines appeared on the screen, in Chinese characters. Really, I was frantically looking for the romanization but they were nowhere to be found.
In the end, I handed my microphone to my friends and let them sing.
Finally though, we switched to some Japanese songs, which thank goodness, I could read the characters. Although I was familiar with hiragana and katakana, still singing out a lot of lines that constantly changed in every five seconds was a pain in the butt. But it was worth the effort.
Even more painful (but fun, still) is that, Teresa - who's an avid Kpop fan - found some Korean songs for me and her to sing. I was fine too with hangul characters, but my reading fluency in Korean characters is worse than in Japanese characters. But she told me to give it a try. So, my tongue literally struggled to adapt to Korean lyrics shortly after singing in Japanese. Anyway, we got to sing BoA and SNSD. No Super Junior or any other songs found there.
I really envy Elda and Teresa, I mean, Elda's fluency in Japanese is much better that she can even sing a rap line fluently and caught up with the fast songs with lyrics that changed in every split seconds. While Teresa is practically fluent in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (her mother language), and Cantonese.
The most fun part that Elda and I got to share is when we sang Perfume's Fushizen na Girl and Chemistry's Life Goes on, cos we both know the songs and the lyrics weren't too bothersome to be followed. Funny thing is, Elda simply altered the word "Life Goes on" to "Life Gosong" (If pronounced quick and added a bit -ng at the end of the word, gosong means 'burned or overcooked' in Bahasa).
Anyway that's the story from our first karaoke visit. After that, we went to Valley Fair where I repaired my laptop at that time.
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The second visit was pretty much about the same.
The second visit was pretty much about the same.
Except that more people were joining! Terry, Aymee, and Nancy decided to come, so it became the seven of us going for karaoke! Even more exciting is the fact that Terry is a Japanese, so it was fun to see her sing Japanese songs using her native tongue.
I'm pretty sure when I was about to take her picture, she wasn't having this pose, but when my shutter clicked, suddenly she struck this kind of pose and the result isn't so bad as you see.
I guess Elda was trying to say 'doubleplusgooood' (a reference to 1984 novel by George Orwell)
Aww....I seriously miss these guys! Singing their song made me want to go back to the days where Taiwanese dramas and songs were such a hype.
We ended the day by going to Quickly for a short hangout and Aymee, Nancy, and Elda having a bite of Pho Vietnamese noodle.
Wish we could have another karaoke session, or maybe do something as fun as that. That'd be awesome, eh?
Gamba Karaoke
19990 Homestead Road Cupertino, CA 95014-0556 - (408) 865-0955
Open Mon-Thu 10am-1am; Fri-Sat 10am-2am; Sun 10am-12am
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