KTV is the Chinese acronym for Karaoke Television (I think). They're a wildly popular bar in the area. People there sing cheesy eastern and western pop songs (and play dumb games it seems). I went in one in Ningbo recently, because someone described them to me, and I had difficult believing that they did any business at all. Once inside I realised they did a roaring trade.

It's mostly people singing Karaoke songs, which is something I'll never understand. Why do people pick the most difficult songs to sing (Celine Dion's "My heart will go on" was very popular the night I went), and then proceed to murder it? You need to be a good singer for some of those songs (or at least be able to hold a tune), and a lot of people really can't hold a tune for toffee (or so it seems). Equally, why do people go to those places to listen to people sing badly? There's nothing so embarrassing as someone doing something badly (to me at least), so I hated watching these people sing.

The second thing is the dumb games people play there. There's a sort of MC, who gets people up to sing. One of the games seems to be "Don't sing a song with a given word in it." Now I could understand words like love, boyfriend, boys, girls, cars etc, but I kid you not the first word they had not to sing was snow. I mean for God's sake, does anyone know any songs that have the word snow in them? No neither did I. Incidentally, the next word up was seven, after which I started wetting myself because of course those songs with the word seven in them came tripping off my tongue.

The third thing is where they get people to mimic dances from adverts or videos. This usually entails a lumbering oaf dancing like Britney, or some skinny little thing mimicking the Michelin Man. This made me wonder "Why?" all over again. I get that sometimes it's important to make a prat of yourself, but in front of complete strangers?