Hardcore regular readers will remember the Ugly Christmas Sweater update from last year. Well the driving force behind it, the group of friends known as BSC were at it again last night. Inspired by our newest members Hana and Jen a Korean night had been arranged.
This had been organized months ago, our group of friends would have a typical Korean adventure, whilst I was a little upset the Korean's didn't share the Thai peoples love of prostitutes I was still game. Then the emails started. It's fair to say that in the build up to last night I must have received an email a day with different instructions/guest-lists/ideas/menu choices. Perhaps the most worrying one came in the middle of last week. we were all emailed a list of Korean traditions when eating dinner and getting drunk on Soja. Basically all the traditions can be honed down to one sentence; The most junior member at the table has the least privileges and has to be everyone else's bitch. Unfortunately for me I am the baby of the group by a good couple of years so it looked like I would spend the evening respecting my elders.
Disaster. Catastrophe. A flu epidemic appears to have struck New York. People left, right and centre started pulling out of our Korean extravaganza. It was suggested that the baby of the group send round an impassioned email begging people to come, but as a stickler for tradition, coupled with the fact I am lazy, I refused. We set off to a Korean Restaurant to begin the evening. The restaurant had been reviewed by the New York Times, a fact it was very proud of. It displayed the review everywhere, on the walls, on the place settings, everywhere. The issue with this was that the review gave it one star..... hmmmm. Also my place setting didn't have a review, it just had pictures of puppies for sale.
I thought the evening was about to take an interesting turn when a new member of the group sat opposite me. This cute new girl suddenly had me shaking off my hangover (oh yeah, I got shitfaced on saturday night). Cute girl looked younger than me too. After some prying I was left disappointed, she was 26 and was in the midst of some major relationship drama. Luckily for her right now my mind game playing is top notch so we had an Oprah moment and I gave her some golden advice.
Finally the food started arriving but not before I had poured everyone their drink whilst not making eye contact! There appeared to be now rules regarding the amount of food the Junior can eat so I stuffed my face.
At this point in the update let's all take a moment to applaud Miss Hana Jung on her food selection. Bravo.
As dinner finished we were off to the second half of the evening. Karaoke. Chinese for empty orchestra.... kinda haunting if you think about it. I had been practicing my repertoire of songs and had made the decision that unless I saw a drunk Asian businessman singing Lady In Red the night was a flop.
We scoured the streets for a decent bar in which to sing and my word did we find one.
We ascended three flights of stairs and pushed open a rickety door to find a Korean couple with some microphones. They ushered us into a room with really really small chairs. It was at this moment we realized we were sitting in a daycare centre. Yes we had managed to find the only place in New York city which is daycare by day and karaoke by night. I personally felt like I was in a crazy strip club. Bright flashing lights, private rooms, a strange looking Asian man on the door. It was odd. They made us place what can only be described as fuzzy condoms on top the microphones so as not to spread germs and we were ready to sing. Unsurprisingly Victoria went first. The music blared out of a huge speaker in our tiny private room and the lights went epileptic. Then the sound of The Spice Girls filled the air. We all chose songs and drank... we needed to, as one bad rendition after another was blared out in this daycare/Karaoke/strip club mash up. The best part of every song was afterwards they would give you a score out of 100. What this was based on we will never know. It was impossible to score below 85 and above 99.If anyone ever breaks the 3 digit barrier in that place drinks are on me. The songs kept coming (my suggestion of 'All By Myself' wasn't taken kindly by the cute girl) and eventually our hour was up (kind of like a strip club).
Eardrums bleeding, pupils dilated we stumbled out into the cool night air perhaps just a tad more cultured than we had been earlier that evening.
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