노래방: Why, God, Why?

If the above Hangeul lettering just looks like little boxes to you, it’s probably because you live outside of Korea, have a crappy computer, or both. If you can see it but can’t read it, that’s probably fine unless you live outside of Korea. If you live in Korea, look me up and I’ll invite you to some free lessons so you can be freakin’ literate. It says “noraebang” (NO-ray-bong). What is a noraebang, you ask? Simple. A noraebang is a place of humiliation and suffering where your dignity goes to die, if you ever had any dignity in the first place. Last weekend I inadvertently, through no fault of my own, went to three of them in two nights. Now I hate myself. Allow me to elaborate.

You have probably heard of Korean Karaoke joints. They had one in the Twin Cities, although I never went because prior to coming to Korea I was violently opposed to karaoke. We got along like oil and the Gulf of Mexico (ooh, too soon?). But I was informed upon arriving in Korea that karaoke is an essential part of the “Korean night out experience”. If you haven’t figured it out yet, a noraebang is the place you go for karaoke in Korea. “Norae” means “song” and “bang” means room, so roughly the two put together means “singing room”. And that’s just what it is. This isn’t a karaoke “bar” like in America. You don’t sit there and watch terrible singers who can’t hold their liquor sing Journey, unless they happen to be your friends. You go with a group of people, generally smuggling in soju or beer or makggeoli or some unholy combination of all three, go into a private room, and you sing your heart out into a tinny little microphone with an uncomfortable amount of echo to it. Which is actually a ton of fun, if you do it every once in awhile. But not three times in two days. Here’s the synopsis:

Noraebang #1: Friday Night – I met up with some friends for burgers and beer at Santa Claus, a "Western-style” bar in Daejeon with the best damn burgers outside of Saint Paul’s own Blue Door Pub. After this, we went to a few other places, including an arcade where we played some rigged basketball games and tried to capture ridiculous little stuffed creatures with metal claws. Anyways, most everyone went home after awhile except for Brandy, another English teacher, who had never been to noraebang but insisted, “I kind of want to sing.” So there you have it. Only two people, but at 2AM it hardly matters anyways. As I said, the first one is pretty fun.

Noraebang #2: Saturday Night – After resolving to meet up with DMZ buddies Danielle and Daniella, later to be met by Ah Young as well as a gaggle of people who I didn’t really know up until that evening, I discovered that Danielle had stealthily been planning to go to noraebang for her first time ever that night. We went a little after 9 o’clock, which for my money is far too early to go to noraebang, ever. What’s worse than this, though, is that Ah Young had been pestering me to learn how to “K-Pop Dance” , which, for guys at least, seems to involve hip-thrusting and tearing one’s shirt off to reveal glistening washboard abs. Unfortunately, I don’t thrust my hips in public nor do I have a washboard stomach, nor do I dance well in general, so my K-Pop Dance moves are limited to something like the following video, which Ah Young also sent me after informing me that she was sure I’d be able to at least pull this dance off. She was wrong.

I can’t even do the K-Pop Dance as well as this guy.

So basically, if you go to noraebang with Korean friends, they might ask you to dance, which is fine for some, but nobody wants to see me do that.

So after two off-key trips in less than twenty-four hours, a few of us decided to go meet up with Melissa (who also came on the Seoul excursion, you’ll remember) at a place called Yellow Taxi, where we drank a few beers, watched a decent rock and roll cover band, and, you guessed it, wound up at noraebang somewhere around 1:30AM.

Noraebang #3: Also Saturday Night – You may wonder why I was subjecting myself to this much torture. At this point, my throat was hoarse from “singing” and I was quite tired. But there’s something about the weekend that makes me believe that it may never come again, so I must spend as much time with my friends as I can before I have to go back to the classroom on Monday. It gets me into trouble sometimes. At this noraebang, the lead singer of the band we had just watched showed up and would not relinquish the microphone. Not for anything. And it was at this point that I realized that he couldn’t sing. Not in a noraebang, at least. Not only was he off key, but it sounded like he was trying to sing some sort of harmony in a key from the seventh circle of hell. After ‘90’s pop ballads, slogging through “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which should just be outlawed from every karaoke playlist, ever, even if I’m often the one that picks it… no, especially because I’m often the one that picks it), and being forcibly “asked” to show off my nonexistent  K-Pop style Six-Pack Dance, I think the last straw may have been standing in a room listening to this guy wail like a kicked baby into a microphone. The worst of it was, I wondered how many more noraebang trips I had left in me before I became that guy.

So after all this incessant negativity, how can I redeem myself? Maybe with a nice, concise, perfectly rational Pro and Con list!

PRO NORAEBANG

1.) You get to act like a fool with your friends and there’s no strangers around to judge you.

2.) You sometimes can hear other people singing in other rooms, and they invariably sound worse than what’s happening in your room.

3.) They’re a great place to seek refuge late at night when you don’t want to go to a bar but don’t want to go home yet, either.

4.) Singing and dancing.

CON NORAEBANG(…this title doesn’t work as well as the “pro” one, does it?)

1.) You will probably have a sore throat from “singing” the next day, at least the first time.

2.) Someone will invariably pick “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Sometimes it’ll be me. If you’ve been drinking soju, you may wake up with headbanger’s neck.

3.) You might get stuck in a noraebang with the guy from the band I saw on Saturday.

4.) Singing and dancing.

Anyways, I can’t really rationalize this rant because I got almost no sleep last night. Which leads me to the last part of this post, entitled:

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A LIST OF THINGS WHICH WOKE ME UP LAST NIGHT BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11:30 PM AND 6:00 AM

1.) A howling, unhappy Jindo dog. A Jindo is a rather cute Korean dog that’s bred only on one island in Korea. One of them lives across the street from me. I’m guessing he was trying to serenade me or something, but it just wasn’t working.

2.) My right shoulder. A few years ago I worked at a summer camp in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was the staff/student soccer game. I tried to steal the ball from some fifteen yeah old athletic beast, and instead tripped over my own feet and wound up tearing some ligaments in the shoulder, which yesterday started screaming in pain. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Jake, why don’t you just go get some Tylenol or something?” Well, I tried, smartypants. I failed at finding it because it takes me twice as long to find simple things here in Korea because I am not good at life.

3.) Someone using a circular saw to cut sheet metal. This sound became familiar to me during my time in the theatre shop in college. It’s one of the worst noises imaginable, and someone was making it repeatedly for the better part of an hour, up until about 12:30, half a block away from me.

4.) What was either a fleet of very old trucks with no mufflers or a parade of jugglers juggling rusty chainsaws. I’m serious here. I was woken up by some sort of unholy roaring outside my window around 1AM and after shaking off the initial reaction that there were dinosaurs rampaging through Daejeon, I went back to sleep. Now I wish I hadn’t, because I keep thinking that it might have been a parade of rusty chainsaw jugglers, and if it was then I’m super-pissed that I missed that.

5.) The absurdly enthusiastic lovemaking of my neighbor upstairs. This was around 2:30AM. Here is a note to all lovers who live in apartment buildings with paper-thin walls: keep it down. Nobody wants to be woken up, much less woken up alone, by what sounds like two cowboys yelling at cattle (I am not exaggerating; just before I turned my music on loud enough to drown out the noise, which was pretty loud, I actually heard someone shout “WHOOP WHOOP!”).

6.) The significant other of my neighbor upstairs leaving, quite noisily, at around 3AM.

7.) The construction across the street from me. This happened at around 5:30, which is a perfectly appropriate time to begin dropping large steel poles to the ground from a height of about twenty feet. This went on at one minute intervals for quite some time. At this point you’re probably thinking “Why don’t you just get some earplugs, Jake?” In response, I’d like to direct you to my answer to your Tylenol query in #2. So maybe you can forgive me for being a wee bit cranky in this particular post.

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If this post seems a little long, rambling, and cynical, I do apologize. That just seems to be my sense of humor these days. I promise that I will try to bring back my sunny disposition for the next post, which will hopefully involve some kind of adventure over the weekend of Buddha’s Birthday. But allow my to leave you with a photograph that I should have put on a previous post. These are my ravaged jeans from Microwave Day.

I tore the pocket open myself after the incident because I like tearing things. ‘Til next time, dear readers!

PS In the time it took me to proofread this post, my upstairs neighbors started going at it again. I’m not kidding. WHOOP WHOOP!