More Karaoke Birthdays!

Over the summer i mentioned that we had been doing an inordinate number of birthday events at karaoke rooms...  its happened again lately!   Actually in HK it makes a lot of sense, there's not a lot of places where 10+ friends can gather in one place and have much privacy.  Restaurants are too crowded,  few people here have large enough houses for a large get together, especially not if they don't want to piss off their neighbors...

Here are a few pics from the last two, you may recognize some people. 

First up, Phil's Birthday,  you saw the cleaned up version in Phil's blog,  here's a few more he didn't show you: This picture is funny because there are four completely distinct emotions being displayed all at once...  Terence is calm and relaxed belting out a cantonese tune,  Shan can't help but scream like a school girl at an NSYNC show.  whereas Amanda is cracking up in laughter and apparently Stephen is dying of boredom.

On the way home everyone suprised Phil with the ceremonial birthday punches...

Jump ahead to last weekend, it was a friend's friend's birthday party.  It was fun except for the guy who insisted on ordering the entire Eason Chan disography ;-)

(and kept jumping his songs to the head of the queue! my Spice Girls was eternally locked two or three pages down the list!)

But its OK, cause there were other things to entertain ourselves with:

"Keep Walking!"

One other funny thing from this party...    When they brought the cake out, the TV automatically switched over to a happy birthday song... I guess the staff has an override button or something that they use for occassions like this.     

Never to miss a chance for product placement,  the music video that plays features EO2 and some female pop singers.  Its relatively unremarkable except for the fact that two of the people are wearing very strange T-shirts:

Yes, the guy on the left and the girl in the center of the right picture are both wearing T-shirts that say 'SHIT' on them...  Happy Birthday indeed!

:ast but not least,  that particular night when I was walking to the bus stop near Sogo in CWB,  I saw a lot of smoke and flashing lights and commotion, so i walked over to look at what it was:

Fire Truck!

Police, firemen and firehoses?!? (and water everywhere)...

I look up and its easy to see what was going on:

apparently there was a fire inside this hair salon on the 2nd floor.  The sprinklers look like they went off and one of the windows was broken out (probably by the firemen?)  by the time i took this picture they had turned off their hoses and were just looking around inside with flashlights.  This one guy stuck his head out when i snapped the photo.

Actually fire in HK is a major concern of mine... since there are so many narrow, tall buildings (for example, my current building is 38 stories!)   also a lot of buildings' narrow staircases are also full of junk and garbage cans...     its better than China at least,  I haven't seen too many cases of firedoors locked w/ bicycle chains here...