Tainan – out to KTV

Our Chinese teacher, AKA "KTV queen", took our small Chinese class out yesterday to a KTV in the NCKU area.

Karaoke Box is a variant of karaoke that is popular in East Asia. It features a small to medium-sized private room containing karaoke equipment for a group of friends to rent in timed increments. A monitor in the room displays lyrics atop a themed music video. The music videos are often not the official videos, but are videos made especially for karaoke establishments. A typical Karaoke Box establishment contains 10-20 such rooms as well as a main "karaoke bar" area in the front. Karaoke Box centers can scale to hundreds of rooms and can be extremely opulent. Karaoke Box establishments often sell refreshments.

In Taiwan and mainland China, Karaoke Box establishments are often known as KTV, and are a popular form of extertainment. Very successful KTV chains in Taiwan include Holiday KTV and Cashbox KTV. "KTV" is an abbreviation for karaoke television, derived as a reference to "MTV". [...]

Karaoke itself is not as prevalent in the Western World as it is in much of Asia. Instead of KTV or Karaoke box, it tends to follow a more public format, which involves singing on stage in bars and clubs instead of in small, private, equipped rooms for rent. This format is arguably more daunting for an underconfident singer with the possibility of a sizable audience of strangers, as opposed to a small number of friends or family (from Wikipedia).

All we have at Israel, and I believe it’s also the same in most of the west, are some Karaoke bars and those aren’t that popular. KTV is a very popular thing to do with your friends and family, some homes having their own set and most people visiting those KTV Karaoke boxes regularly. According to my Japanese class-mates I think the most passionate Karaoke setting is found in Japan, with friends doing an all-night-all-day Karaoke rounds.

So, we all went to the Holiday KTV, and here’s a little of what KTV looks like: