What a night. The staff took me out for my welcome dinner, which was far more lavish than I ever expected. It was in a private room at a five star place. One of the other teachers took some pics, I'll see if I can get them for a later post. In typical Chinese fashion, you order a billion different dishes that the entire table shares from. The table itself had a giant lazy susan in the middle you could just spin until you got to what you wanted. Explaining "Lazy Susan" in Chinese was a bit entertaining.

Afterwards we got to go out to karaoke, or as they call it here "KTV" to avoid actually calling it karaoke. They really don't like the Japanese here. I mean sure, I guess they have their reasons. But I find that they deliberately go out of the way to avoid anything Japanese. Even the Japanese appliances are segregated from their Chinese counterparts. One of the teachers was even telling me about how hard it is for the Japanese to do business here. Weird stuff.

While I'm by no means an expert on karaoke, between the American, Korean, and Japanese versions, I can say that the Chinese version sucks the most. They separate everything out in a fairly arbitrary manner that makes it very difficult to find what you're looking for. Want to search for artist blank? There are two different sections for foreign songs, so you have to do it twice. It's really quite an awful system. While browsing through the categories though, I came across hiragana! Oh happy days were here! I could hopefully bring up songs by AKFG, Bump of Chicken, Flow, Nico Touches the Walls, and a whole bunch of other bands nobody reading this has ever heard of. I tried romaji, but that only brought up songs actually in romaji. I asked one of the bilingual teachers if there is a button to change to gana/kana, and she gave it a look over and said no. So, I have no idea how to search for songs I like. Even their regular English offerings were quite terrible. Yes they had Queen, but only two songs - and one of them was not Bohemian Rhapsody. For shame, China. For shame. Hopefully there's a better KTV than this one around.

I'm really thankful I had the forethought to buy a coffee machine yesterday, it's a godsend after last night. So. Much. Alcohol. Anyway, the picture is of my lunch yesterday from the cafeteria. Now you can be the envy of your friends by knowing what fast food in China looks like.