A NIGHT OUT - Karaoke

As the idea for this blog is to give out suggestions for off-the-beaten track places, here we go! Your travel guide probably suggests you should visit Liberdade, the Japanese (and now also Korean and Chinese) neighborhood in São Paulo, whose streets are adorned with typical Japanese lights and red posts, plus Japanese and Chinese restaurants, shops, not to mention an arts and crafts market on Sundays (very entertaining, actually).

But let's imagine you want to spend the night out with friends and would like to do something a bit weird, but fun... that's what I did yesterday, I spent the night singing at Samurai Karaoke (R. da Glória, 608 - Liberdade). Samurai holds an oriental restaurant on the ground floor and the karaoke room on the top floor. Entrance is R$ 10,00 for women and R$ 15,00 for men (for the karaoke room only) and you may sing as much as time allows you (hostesses take people from each table in turns, so the emptier the place, the more you sing). They've got lots of songs in Portuguese, English, Japanese, and even a good deal of songs in Italian and Spanish. You may also order food and drinks from the restaurant below. The whole place has an air of decadence, receiving loners, groups of elderly people, Japanese ladies, and even large crowds of young people celebrating birthdays... you feel somehow inside the movie 'Lost in Translation', but if you like to sing and you do have some nice company, you certainly will have a good time! The place is open from 6pm from Monday to Saturday and closes after 3a.m.

Rua da Glória is parallel to R. Galvão Bueno, the main shopping street in Liberdade. Just go one block down... Actually the area has some other karaokes, the most famous of which is Karaoke Choperia Liberdade, on the 523. This is a much larger, crowded and completely kitsch place in which you have to pay R$ 2,00 for each song you sing and sometimes wait for hours to sing one song. But the atmosphere is that of a large party, but if perhaps you don't really have a large group of friends and would like to meet some locals (and maybe singing is not really your goal) this is the place to go!