Control your pitch, please :)

Trying to restore all of my story-telling mode on.
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.

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

Trip to Taiwan - Part 8 (Special Theme Park!)

Taking off from Taichung again, and now we were heading towards Sun Moon Lake. The journey took less than 3 hours, unexpectedly. Guess the place wasn't that far, eh?

Our first destination of the day would be...*drumroll* wait for it *drumroll*... SUN MOON LAKE ROPEWAY! In case you don't know what kind of place it is, it's an aboriginal village and the best part is, it has a theme park! Yay! We finally got to visit a theme park in Taiwan!

It was still a long way though, and some of us decided to sleep (including me), as the fu dao yuans played a movie, IP Man 2 on the TV bus. The beginning of the climax was a bit too noisy that I was instantly woken up during the fight scene. Therefore I couldn't sleep anymore and decided to catch up on the movie.
Just as the climax ended, everyone seemed to be woken up and paid attention a lot to the movie. Yeah, the climax of the movie - no matter you caught on the story from the beginning or not - was a bit thrilling. But at the same time, we'd reached the destination without even finishing the movie.

The place was freaking hot and crowded. I wonder why because it was Monday and I thought the place would be a little quieter than it should be. But then reality hit me: it was holiday season! Duh.
To get to the aboriginal village and theme park, we must ride on cable car that would take us to sort of the top of the hill. Kinda reminds me of Genting though

Scenic panorama taken from the cable car


Rows of colorful cable car.


From left to right: Monika, Sonya, Didi, Janet

Once we got there, we took like an open vehicle ride passing the aboriginal village straight to the theme park. We'd visit the aboriginal village later, because now, all we wanted to do was to HAVE FUN!

From left to right: Katrin, Sunita, Karin

Before we started the day with thrill rides and stuff, we settled down for a moment to have lunch. Here's our lunch:

Done eating! Now my friends and I - all stick in one group - took off together to seek for rides. Since we just finished eating, possibly we wouldn't do any rides that included extreme spin, twirl, or anything that could mess up our intenstines. =___= Our first ride would be...Space Mountain! If you know what it is, yes, it's an indoor roller coaster, with - thankfully - no upside down spin that I hate. Not bad for "warming up"

After Space Mountain, some of my friends decided to go for a ride which resembled Dufan's Tornado. Me and some of my other friends who had this fear on twisting and twirling just waited while watching our friends screaming as the compartment lifted and twisted them in the air.

The non-thrill-riders

Next rides included splash rides. So, again, we would be all wet today. There were two splash rides at the theme park. One had two small drops and another one had one, short yet backwards drop and lastly, a giant drop. The one with two small drops was called Gold Mine Adventure. To anticipate for being splashed and wet, we sported our yellow raincoats given to us earlier. The water that splashed soon after we were dropped in Gold Mine Adventure didn't give too much wet effect. My hair was just partially wet.

The next splash ride was even more thrilling with 30 meters drop >_<, called Caribbean Splash. I gotta brace on this. After the giant drop and splash, turned out that we got even more wet than before!! Later on, we split into two groups. One group decided to go on for more thrill rides. The other group (me included) decided to go for more chill rides, because practically we had no guts getting on for more thrill rides. Let's just call my group as "The Non-Thrill-Riders" :)

My group stumbled upon a simulator ride and we even found it really exciting, except for the part that too many extreme shakes can hurt your butts. Yeah right.
My group then rode on the cable car to go to Aboriginal Village we passed earlier, to watch a traditional Aboriginal show in Naruwan Theatre. We happened to meet with three fu dao yuans, one of which was our fu dao yuan - Mia - who also wanted to watch the same show.

The show went on and it was really just fascinating! (Well for me it was) No special effects involved, just some Aboriginal people dancing, whose dance eventually symbolized something. Man, I felt like studying Anthropology at that moment. Some after-show event included fortune telling, where this fortune teller would give you a small fruit. You clasped them in your grasp and you sort of made a wish.

We also spotted a traditional game and even took pictures in Aboriginal Traditional houses.

From left to right: Felicia, Sonya, Didi, Karin

From left to right: Karin, Audrey, Sonya, me, Felicia, Tasya, and Jane


Witnessing the traditional game takes place

Now, we took off from Aboriginal Village back to the theme park by the open vehicle (it was 4 pm and the cable car had stopped operating). Once we got there, three of my friends from my non-thrill-riders group decided to ride on a giant drop ride called UFO.
One of my three friends, Felicia, got very scared but succeeded to overcome her fear. Look at her expression while getting off the ride :)

Tense much?


From left to right: Jane, Didi, Felicia

We gathered back in the hall where we had lunch earlier. A group of Aboriginal people we spotted dancing earlier was also there, but now they formed a choir and sang a traditional song, possibly to welcome us all there.

Time to leave Sun Moon Lake Aboriginal Village and theme park, as now we were heading towards the hotel and spent the rest of the night there. The hotel was located on the top of a hill overlooking the lake. After dropping our bags to our rooms, my friends and I gathered in the hotel's balcony to play some games and watched the sun setting in the lake. What a breathtaking panorama.

From left to right: Celine, Didi, Jeje, Audrey, Jesse, Felicia, me


From left to right: Jeje, Audrey, Tasya, Celine, me, Felicia

At 7, my group joined the karaoke session along with the fu dao yuans where they sang some old songs in both Chinese and English. This picture below is low quality since it was taken by my Blackberry. But I feel like posting it. Take a look.

Before going to bed, all of my group gathered in Janet's room (since she was the leader of our group) to plan for the fu dao yuan's surprise approaching the farewell.

So that concludes our night :)

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