"and the piano sounds like a carnivore..."

Billy Joel

"Sing us a song, you're the piano man..."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Last Saturday, my wife and I took our kids out to eat at one of the many Korean restaurants in our neighborhood -- our 'hood being Seoul, you might say that it has a plethora of Korean restaurants -- and afterwards headed off for a good time in a noraebang bar, the Korean equivalent of a karaoke bar.

The kids had been pleading to go, but my wife had been stalwartly against the idea because it involved spending thousands of won! That does sound frightening, but for a man like me, willing to shell out 900 won for a Snickers bar, what's a few thousand more for a noraebang bar? Granted, the latter doesn't have that chewy, chocolaty, peanutty taste, but many good things don't -- like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, which is more crunchy than chewy. And bars do usually offer peanuts, right?

But I'm being a little misleading. The naoraebang 'bar' here in Korea, like the karaoke 'bar' in Japan, is more of box than a bar. One rents a room for an hour or two and sings along to videos that provide lyrics onscreen to accompany the music for whatever song one has selected. You probably already know this, but my Ozark relatives who read this blog might be wondering. Folks, just think Northeast Asian honky tonk. And don't confuse going noraebanging with going noribanging ... though I'm told that the latter sort of banging goes on in some noraebangs.

Be that as it may, my wife had already declared against any noraebanging that particular Saturday, but I thought a bit of singing sounded like a good family thing to do. I didn't, however, want to undermine my wife's resolution in front of the kids, so I did what we sometimes do to hide topics of conversation from them. I switched to German:

"Sollten wir singen gehen?" I suggested, which translates as "Should we go singing?"

Longtime readers will recall that my future wife and I met on a train in Germany, but I might have neglected to mention that we spoke almost solely German for the first three years of our relationship -- though her Deutsch was always far better than mine.

To cut to the chase, after a brief Teutonic conversation:

"Sollten wir?" she wondered.

"Ja! Gehen wir!" I affirmed.

"Es kostet Geld!" she objected.

"Geld! Schmeld!" I explained.

My reasons being sufficient, we informed our by now teutonically-suspicious Kindern that we would, after all, go to the noraebang.

We found one just a few steps down the street. My kids selected for themselves mainly Korean songs -- they especially love Super Junior's "Miracle" -- but for me, they particularly chose Billy Joel's "Piano Man." Both Sa-Rah and En-Uk love singing along to that with me, but En-Uk's pronunciation sometimes sounds more Korean than English as he belts out in his nearly inimitable way:

"...and the piano sounds like a carnivore..."

Hence ruining the song for me, a song that I'd otherwise loved since it first came out in my high school years. I now can't get this bastardized line out of my head, and every night, my kids insist on singing it with En-Uk's alteration as a bedtime lullaby though it sounds more like the stuff of nightmares. A piano can look rather like a carnivorous monster, what with all those gleaming white teeth and and upper jaw that could slam closed on one's fingers.

My kids have even added sound effects:

"... and the piano sounds like a carnivore--"

"Rrruuuaahhhh!"

"Eeeeeeeeee..."

As the piano player disappears into the monster piano's capacious mouth. Seven-year-old En-Uk loves his version and the sound effects, but he now refuses to fall sleep alone.

And later in the night, after En-Uk has fallen into a peaceful sleep, I have to get up in the dark and pass by our own, silently waiting piano, obscured in shadows but its ivory keys nocturnally gleaming...