Saturday was such a nice day. Hanging out with friends, eating delicious Mexican food, and singing it up at a noraebong. Allow me to elaborate with prose, pictures, and video. :)
The day started off pretty great. I got a box from my parents with peanut M&M's (probably one of my favorite candies and it's pretty hard to find in Korea and is also kind of expensive here... sad day), cherry cough drops, two movies (Elf and the new Alice in Wonderland!), and a mini nutcracker to decorate my apartment. What a great start to a great day.
Then Kendra and I headed over to Jessica's house to watch a funny k-pop music video of F.Cuz (pronounced "Focus"), eat lots of snacks, talk, and watch Elf. Good times. I love Jessica's apartment. I can overlook most of its faults (older building, fifth floor and no elevator, up on a hill) for the fact that it has a BATHTUB. That's wicked awesome.
Jessica decided that we need to learn the dance for the awesome F.Cuz song we watched and perform it sometime at a noraebong. We decided that the dance might be doable, but since it's all in Korean it might be a little difficult to actually sing along. You have to watch this, though. It pretty much encapsulates everything awesome about K-pop: pretty boys (by pretty I mean PRETTY as opposed to handsome... some of them could very well be girls), strange clothes (my favorite is the hat with the chin tail and spikes), random bad English, and cutesey hand moves in the dance.
We headed out to Sincheon at about 5:30 to meet up with a bunch of people for Brooke's birthday! Along the way we passed a bunch of people dressed as Santa. All foreigners. We're not sure why but we think it was a game to see who could get the most pictures with random Koreans while dressed as Santa. I should have grabbed one and gotten a Santa picture for Mom. Dang. I just thought of that. Sorry, Mom. I'll try to catch one next time.
Anyways, we got to Sincheon and then headed to On the Border.
Yes. An actual Mexican Restaurant. Oh, so happy. It was mucho fun. And very delicious. It started us with chips and salsa. The chips were taco shells broken in half and the salsa looked more like cheap pizza sauce, but it was still yummy.
Adam and I decided that if we were going to splurge on expensive Mexican food (about $15 for an entree... not TOO bad but more than I usually pay to eat out), we might as well go all out. So we split a virgin peach margarita schooner. That was yummy. Here's a question though: does it really need the salt on the rim if there's no alcohol? Hmm...
I got the tres enchiladas: spicy chicken with sour cream sauce. Just what I wanted. Tons of sour cream, black beans, Mexican rice, and though it was a little on the bland side (could have done with a little more spicy), but it was still delicious.
*burp*
The waiters even got a poncho and sombrero for Ms. Brooke to wear for her birthday song!
Check it out. We're in Korea, at a Mexican restaurant, and the waiters sang in English. That was awesome.
If you are ever in Korea and feel a need to find foreigners (i.e. not Koreans) then this is the place to go. I would say over 50% of the tables were people I would have felt fairly confident I could go up to, speak English, and that would have been their native language.
Also, the girl that sat next to me is from South Africa and this was her first time ever eating Mexican food. We were all really excited to introduce her to the different options. She is in love with it now and we promised that we'd take her for her birthday.
After the dinner of awesome, we headed around the corner to a luxury noraebong. Yay! I was finally able to accomplish #3 on The List of things to do in Korea. And it definitely did not disappoint.
For those of you who don't know, a noraebong is a place to sing karaoke. Unlike the United States, you don't go to a bar to sing, you get your own room, they got snacks, drinks, and booze, along with bongo drums, tambourines, and maracas to accompany your singers.
This was a luxury noraebong so walking in was kind of like walking into a hotel in Vegas. Complete with chandeliers.
We were directed to a room where we had to take off our shoes before going in. That's one thing about Korea: you can't wear holey or mis-matched socks because you never know when you might need to take them off to eat or, apparently, noraebong. The room itself was great. Lots of seating, a little stage at the front for your more performance inclined group members, awesome lighting, more chandeliers...
First thing, Robyn was on that option book plugging in ABBA songs to start us off. Heck yes!
Dancing Queen! Young and sweet, only seventeen! (Left to right: Corrina, Darcy, and Robyn with Shannon's head in the bottom)
After a few minutes, one of the attendants came in with "service": a bunch of free waters and a few peach waters (one of my favorite drinks here) for us. Sweet! That giant remote control thing is what we used to plug in the numbers for the songs.
Here's the birthday girl and some girl whose name I don't know singing "Faith."
Darcy accompanying some people with her maraca.
Corinna belting it out. Probably another ABBA song. They were popular last night.
People choosing songs while others are singing.
The place itself was really cool. Lots of couches and several raised areas with steps to sit on if you were so inclined. Two video screens so you could stand on the floor and sing or on the stage and face the "crowd" to do your thang. The videos behind the words had absolutely nothing to do with the songs. It was a running loop of clips from music videos, previews for dramas, and probably some other stuff that we didn't get. Also, at the end of your song, it would give you a score and yell something at you in Korean. They were all high scores like 98%!!! 좋은 직장을!!!
Here's a video of one of my personal favorite performances from the evening: Eye of the Tiger!! I wanted to get a video that showed the different sides of the room, like the light show in the back.
Now, technically, I'm not supposed to be singing, right? Well, I told myself that I would only sing one song, maybe two. Well, that didn't happen. I sang probably five songs: "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Mama Mia," "All I Want for Christmas is You," and "Piano Man." Maybe bits of a few others. Other than that I stuck to the tambourine and maracas. I still think I was pretty good considering how much I WANTED to sing.
My throat is a little sore today, but only about as bad as it did on Thursday after teaching two classes. Dad gave me one of his Looks when we were on Skype, though, and did the "You're a grown up now; you can make your own decisions." *grumblegrumble* Way to make a girl feel guilty.
All in all, it was an amazing weekend. We'll have to do noraebong again. Maybe I'll have to wait another month or so, though, until my voice is completely healed up. *sigh* I also will have to remember not to scream at the Bi concert on New Years Eve. So excited for that! I'll be even more excited once I am able to get the website working so I can purchase my tickets!
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