the Beijinger

The Galaxy Soho was alive with wild animals Saturday – tigers, chimps and even dragons were on the scene to celebrate The Beijinger's 10th Annual Reader Bar & Club Awards. More than 500 nightlife personalities and readers joined in on the fun and helped celebrate the winners, fueled by free flowing drinks, eye-catching performances, and food. We caught some shots of the action below.

The Beijinger presented its 10th Annual Reader Bar & Club Awards Saturday evening at Galaxy SOHO. Over 500 nightlife personalities and readers turned up to food, drinks, and performances. Below is the full list of winners and outstanding establishments. Congratulations to everyone who took home a prize!

As good as Beijing’s homegrown comedy and improv scenes are (and they have come on a lot in recent years), there’s nothing quite like the buzz you get from watching the professionals at work. Especially when they have to go on audience cues such as “Martian hospital drama,” “ventriloquist convention” and “vegan film noir.”

This week, the Punchline Comedy Club brings four pros who are well up to the task – they are all graduates of the British TV version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? They are playing two nights: Paddy’s Irish Bar (May 21) and Beer Mania (May 22). 

A statue of a prostitute pig guards the entrance of Crossover Club. Like most of the things that adorn this tiny bar in Nali Patio, she can be yours if you’re willing to fork out thousands of RMB.

Uniformity is a regular magazine column where we ask Beijing personalities about the various outfits that have defined them over the years.

When we asked freelance filmmaker Gabriel Trane Clermont to think back over all the uniforms he’s ever worn, we were broadly defining “uniform” to refer to clothes/headwear that:

It’s time to don your sweatbands. Kerry Sports, the CBD’s upscale fitness center, will reopen its doors May 25 after a seven month, RMB 35 million renovation. If the RMB 25,000 annual membership seems out of reach, you can attend their grand opening celebration to see what you’re missing (a 35-meter heated pool, juice bar, and tennis and basketball courts for starters).

Beijing's diversity and Internet anonymity make for strange bedfellows. Nowhere is this more true than in our website's Classified Ads section. We've seen it all – and then some. And that doesn't even cover the ads we must disapprove because they just aren't fit for a good, clean, wholesome website like ours.

This guy had his bike stolen. His plea so touched our very hearts that we decided to share it with you. We've all lost a bike or two in our day and know the pain far too well. Oh, the anger: 

You've not only taken my property, but force me to squeeze in a bus and smell the subway odor. My dusty shoes weep tears for their aching soles as we dip and roll through the craters in the pavement. Put me on wheels!

This is no laughing matter. If you see this man's bike please give him a call. 

Chinese director Jia Zhangke rose to fame directing sullen, methodically-paced dramas about life in modern China, and his latest effort continues this theme, albeit with a far less subtle edge.

According to Salon.com:

“A Touch of Sin” both is and is not like Jia’s other films, which include “Still Life,” “The World” and “Unknown Pleasures,” along with several documentaries. Locations for these four allegorical tales are similarly downscale, ranging from brothels to bus and train stations to beaten-down peasants’ households to a dormitory for industrial workers. And then there’s all the killing. It would be a mistake to advertise this as an action movie – although some American distributor probably will – because it sets up false expectations. But Jia has evidently decided he’s done with subtlety and wants to move to a starker level of metaphor. Drawing on several different spectacular true-crime stories – a relatively new phenomenon in China – he delivers an art-house film with the body count of a “Die Hard” sequel.

How happy are Chinese families? It’s not as simple a question as it may appear.