Most Korean places include all of these little dishes with your meal, placed in the middle of the table for sharing, and this place kept them coming. They were all delicious, and almost all impressively spicy. Good thing I built up a tolerance in Thailand!
So after making Shama's acquaintance at McSorley's, as well as her friend Seint, also in the clinical psych. program, I received an invitation to their joint birthday party (they were actually born on the same day) which took place on Wednesday. There's a street in downtown NYC known as Korea Town, or K-Town for those in the know. After a tasty dinner of Korean BBQ (with a specially ordered tofu bowl for the party pooper vegetarians in the house), we headed off to karaoke.
Seint and me, digesting.
I've done karaoke once before in the city, and it's fantastic because it reminds me so much of Japan. I'm sure there are traditional, American-style karaoke bars around the city, but in K-Town you can find the kind of karaoke they have in Japan: rooms of varying size that you rent for your group of friends only. The people at the front desk give you a few microphones, sometimes a tambourine or two, and let you have at it. It typically costs around $8 per person, per hour. In Japan, both of these things (Korean BBQ and karaoke) were some of my favorite things to do, and we had an absolutely fantastic time. Each person gets to sing much more often with this kind of set up, and it's not nearly as scary to sing in front of friends. It helps that most karaoke bars serve up liquid courage as well, to sort of loosen things up. I had an absolutely wonderful time.
The next morning, I got a text message from my friend Eddie, whom you may remember from my Halloween blog, inviting me to do karaoke with some of his friends on Friday for his birthday. Eddie was born and raised in Manhattan, and I met him in Japan where he was also a teacher. He was a musical theater major at Ithaca. Before that, he went to a high school with a focus on performing arts. His sister had a role in "Spring Awakening," a hugely popular musical on Broadway, for about a year before she headed off to college. His dad won a Tony. So his social group consists almost entirely of obscenely talented people, and I can't even begin to describe how impressive a scene I found myself in the middle of last night. One girl I met is an opera singer, and she performed an operatic version of "Like a Virgin" that would have left Madonna pretty impressed. Another guy toured for four years with "Cats" and "Oklahoma!" I'm not sure about the bios of any of the other attendees, but it was clear that they were all professionals. Another girl I met had directed some production that Eddie had been in recently. She's a dancer, not a singer, and she and I talked about how we felt like we should have bought tickets for the night. It was one hell of a show. At Shama and Seint's birthday party, I did a lot of singing. There were only about ten of us, as opposed to the 30 at Eddie's, and I was better than the majority of them. At Eddie's party, however, I was not about to grab the mic in front of that crowd. I was more than content to just watch the show, however.
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