Chinese karaoke at 3.30am gave us a first night to remember

After dumping her bags at a hostel in Hong Kong, this week’s winner got an unexpected taste of the local nightlife with a party invitation

My friend Hannah and I landed in Hong Kong with not-sofresh faces (it was a long flight), heavy backpacks and a sense of impending adventure. We had just graduated and had student loans to burn, a scarily underdeveloped sense of fear, and memories to make.

We took a shuttle bus into the city and booked the cheapest room in the nearest hostel – a bunk-bed-filled (and we later discovered, bed-bug-filled) room for eight. I chatted to a girl from Wiltshire who personified gap year. She had unwashed, plaited hair, scrappy bracelets, baggy trousers, a tie-dye top and grubby skin. She told me, “Travelling has helped me reflect on who I truly am as a person. It’s brought a lot to the surface for me to work through and I’ve found the process so humbling.”

Wow, I thought, feeling inadequate. I would never get to this state of enlightenment, as all I was on was a long holiday. “How long have you been travelling?” I asked. “One week,” she replied, completely oblivious to how ridiculous she now was to me.

It was 6pm and we were eager to explore. We followed a stream of people to a local restaurant, pointed at pictures on the menu, sat on tiny plastic chairs and ate fantastic food. I then had an inspired idea – to immerse ourselves in the culture, we should sing karaoke! We soon spotted a karaoke sign and ventured inside; it was like a hotel lobby with a velvety interior and a reception desk. We couldn’t hear or see anyone singing, just a queue of suited men being ushered through doors. We walked sheepishly up to the desk and the staff looked at us with complete disdain, and shooed us away. It was such a comedown after street-sellers treated us like goddesses. We tried a few others and got the same reaction.

We gave up and went to a bar. At closing time, we got talking to the band, who invited us to a party. We thought that was brilliant and not at all dangerous, so we followed them blindly into a closed shopping centre, and into a lift to the top floor. The door opened to a packed room of friendly, lively people, keen to include us.

We tried to play the bluffing dice game Perudo (difficult to learn in Chinese) and tried to line dance (difficult if you don’t know the moves), and it was great fun. At 3.30am we moved on with our new friends into a closed bar lock-in. Then, something magical happened – the giant screen was switched on, and karaoke commenced! We had achieved our mission and it didn’t even matter that the words on screen were in Chinese, as were most of the songs. We sang into the early hours and knew that, if this was what the first night held, we were in for an amazing four months. And we were right.

Natalie Ahmed