Bhutan - Karaoke

On the last night in country my guide asked me if I wanted to go out on the town to a karaoke bar. Oh, hell yes. I had amazing visions of wow'ing the locals with the most stirring rendition of Peter Cetera's Glory of Love (1986, Karate Kid II) that they'd ever heard.
Well, Karaoke in Bhutan is a different thing. We went into the basement of a house, where the proprietor had set up rows of very low benches and a stage. A band of two dudes, one with a lute and the other with a flat string instrument played kind of like a lap steel guitar, stood facing away from the "audience" (my guide, my driver, and me) while a bunch of Bhutanese women danced traditional dances on stage while singing. When one of them messed up a dance step, the proprietor, who stood in the back, would ring a bell. They would all stop, the band would restart the music, and they would begin again. Needless to say it was surreal.
At one point my guide leaned over to me and said (paraphrasing, but reducing the amount of prepositions, noun markers, and conjunctions to simulate broken English) "Very sad, girls come from smaller villages East Bhutan to West to make life, end up dancing bar", insinuating these women, fully dressed from head to toe, singing traditional songs and dancing traditional dances, were somehow equivalent to our cornfed midwestern girls coming out to Hollywood to be a star and ending up stripping at Crazy Girls. Awesome.