Bangkok, Day Two: Are You Tuk-Tuking To Me?

If you enjoy karaoke, alcohol and free-roaming feral cats, than there was no better place to be Friday night than Bangkok’s Suan-Lum Night Bazaar, where the 5th annual Karaoke World Championship got underway. Seventeen singers from eleven different countries* performed two songs each, and despite the humidity and fog machines, none of them passed out. The beer garden was larger than I expected (its website says it holds 6,000**) and, for the first few hours, surprisingly crowded; despite the fact that this was a last-minute venue change, the organization managed to get the word out. Those in attendance got to hear several power ballads (Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go,” U2’s “One”), and saw this year’s two U.S. contestants, Michael Moses Grifith of Illinois and Barbie Robbins of Kentucky. Some poorly taken photos:



As if the on-stage antics weren’t enough, the beer garden has eight private karaoke booths on site, though only a handful of songs are in English, so I didn’t get a chance to try them out. But I did see a group of about a half-dozen or so exchange students from the U.S. and Australia crammed into a booth, trying to improvise their way through a Thai ballad. The gentlemen overseeing the rooms, Mr. Pornchai (below), told me they get an average of 100 customers a day; he also told me that karaoke is a relatively new phenomenon in Thailand—it only really took off, he said, in the last ten years—and that much of the hold-up was over copyright disputes and song availability.



But the real highlight of the evening took place afterwards, in the lobby of the Arnoma Hotel: That’s where a group of about 20 or so contestants and friends gathered around a piano to sing along to the likes of “Stand By Me,” “Sweet Child O’Mine,” and, of course, “We Are The World.” It was almost 1:30 a.m., and these people had just spent the last five hours listening to karaoke; they had every excuse to head back to their rooms and enjoy the silence. But they love nothing more than to sing, and so the prospect of a makeshift music hall (especially one that’s well-stocked with cheap Thai beer) is irresistible.

I stayed for an hour, watching with a placid, infant-like grin on my face. I don’t want to sound like a Nextel ad, but there’s something joyous about seeing people from so many different countries communicating with each other, especially when they do so using music. This upcoming week will mark another 9/11 anniversary, and for the last six years, the U.S. has alienated much of the rest of the world; at this point, whenever I visit another country, I automatically assume that somebody’s going to corner me and ask about Bush. But there were no politics in the room last night,*** and while I don’t want to extrapolate a big notion from a little moment, it’s comforting to know that the world’s not so far gone that we can’t all stop for a few minutes and break into a Stevie Wonder song now and then.

* Australia, Austria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Malaysia, Poland, Sweden, Thailand, United States
** UPDATE: The organizers tell me it's actually 2,500.
*** UPDATE: Of course, because I wound up leaving, I found out that I did, indeed, miss the political discussions that went on until dawn. But I'd prefer to remember my naive little "we're all in the same gang" moment as it is.