A Little Birthday Ditty

I'm another year older and none the wiser.

My birthday began as usual with work and such. The only problem was that I was told I would have to take part in the recording of a video for the university--on the one day in more than a year that I decided to wear jeans to work. They rewrote the lyrics from the Olympic song "北京欢迎你" (Beijing Welcomes You) to fit with the school. And they expected me to sing.

There's are two problems with the situation: I don't sing and I can't read all the characters for the Chinese they want me to sing. My office never got the memo that I sing worse than a dying cat on morphine. Fortunately, they let me be part of the inaudible background. But I did get to lip-sync like a star in the opening ceremony of the Olympics for the video.

Mr. W took us out to a KTV in Bao'an last night for some fun before my girlfriend and I leave for Thailand tomorrow. He's been more than helpful in my quest to stay in China.
I'm pretty sure this is a new KTV (or maybe just remodeled). They have a nice buffet for dinner... although I couldn't figure out what a few of the items were because I haven't learned to read those characters yet.
My girlfriend decided to coax me into singing with them. I'm certainly no singer (think Bob Dylan, but less melodic), but after a few beers I took a look through the English catalogue. I was impressed by the near 2000 English songs. Well, that number is a bit lower due to repeated song titles that are simply misspelled. There are also quite a few Chinglish titles that made me laugh. I tried to do The Beatles' "Revolution" (spelled "Revolutin"). Strangely, one line was messed up in the song... and it wasn't the one about Chairman Mao. I was later tempted to sing one of the two versions they had of "Funkytown." I'm glad I decided against that.