Street Karaoke

An activity I’ve been hoping to do as a family our entire time is SE Asia is karaoke. I never got very serious looking for places, and nothing had naturally presented itself by the time our friends joined us in Vietnam. Thankfully, Holly was determined to make it happen. She and I weren’t the only ones into the idea—Keegan was very excited about it and got quite thoughtful about which songs he would perform (he also practiced frequently).

After searching a bit for a venue, we decided we needed to take matters into our own hands, so Holly downloaded an app and paid to get access to almost any song we could think of. One night at about 10:00, we took our karaoke machine (i.e. Holly’s phone) to the center of town in Hanoi next to a lake and sang gleefully for about 30-45 minutes with song choices including Shut Up and Dance, Ring of Fire, Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm (by Crash Test Dummies…the lyrics are weirder than I remembered), Believer (Keegan’s choice), and We Are Young. We got a lot of looks from passersby ranging from confusion to amusement, and I noticed at least a couple people stop and watch for a bit. I’d like to think we brought some joy to people while making fools out of ourselves. We certainly had fun! The best part was during Shut Up and Dance, Anya noticed a nearby European guy was singing along and invited him to come join us and he happily did! Holly’s app took videos of all the performances, which should probably never see the light of day, but we’re including the one below that features the stranger that joined us.

The next night was the Moes’ and Trevor’s last night with us, so we decided to go out with a bang and broke out some spontaneous karaoke in a gelato shop. This time we went with a couple classics we could really belt out: Piano Man followed by Sweet Caroline. Even though we were making quite a scene, the gelato guy just gave us some smiles and pulled out his phone to capture the moment on video. We had such a blast the whole visit with our friends, and this was a really fun way to wrap up our time together, throwing inhibitions to the wind and creating lasting memories.