the Beijinger

You might have seen Anthony Collins at White Rabbit when he last played Beijing in May 2010. (He even turned up at our Reader Bar & Club Awards party that year.) Collins is back in town to play INTRO Electronic Music Festival on May 26, and we asked him about jazz, cocktails and social networking as he prepared for his return.

Time for another scout report on the weekend's aural offerings. And it's a full gamut being proffered this weekend. It kicks off tonight with a show by electro folkster Jean-Sebastien Hery (aka Djang San, aka Zhang Si'an). Taking a break from some of his other side projects, it's a night of straight up romantic electro folk at Blue Stream Bar.

The venue for INTRO 2012 has changed from 751 D-Park in 798 to Xiedao ICEC, which looks an awful lot like Crab Island. There's good news, though. It is the same lineup but now the party will go on even longer. The organizers were forced to take the electronica fest outside of the Fifth Ring and they've found one (map below) at very short notice just 30 minutes drive from the original. INTRO 2012 will lay on buses from both the 751 D-Park and Wudaokou to the new venue. They'll be ready to got at 1pm and will leave once they are full. The bus will cost RMB 10 for a return trip. If you need more information (in English) then call 158 1148 9839 or 158 1149 5826. If you don't make it to INTRO then you can still feel part of it by getting to the afterparty at Lantern.

With all the results announced on Saturday at our 2012 Reader Bar & Club Awards party, now it's time to take a closer look at the bar scene. We didn't have a Gay-Friendly Bar category this year as our nomination panel didn't manage to collectively come up with enough venues for you readers to vote on. We thought that this was still a very valuable category, though, so we asked the nice folks at Beijing LGBT Center to help us. They were kind enough to do so. Here is what they consider to be the best of Beijing's gay-friendly nightlife venues.

Over the past two years (and probably since all eternity) Beijing’s inhabitants have had the longest commutes of all of China. Oddly, last year’s 50 minutes was somehow ten minutes less than the year before. However, China Daily recently posted an article on a new study that quotes a Beijinger’s average commute at 1 hour and 20 minutes. To measure ourselves against the rest of Beijing we did a little in-house survey. Here’s what we figured out

As Beijing’s reputation grows, there are certain things about the city that have become famous around the world – the culture, the architecture, the exploding economic development – but I think there’s one thing Beijing should get more credit for, because it’s an area in which the city is absolutely world-class: the lunatics.

By lunatics, I don’t mean just your humdrum, day-to-day loonies, like the taxi driver who spits into his passenger seat, or the attention-craving sajiao girl who jumps out of her boyfriend’s car to sit and pout on the highway. I mean the people who have an entire, well-developed persona of craziness, the kind of lunatic that can make a subway ride or an otherwise boring night out truly special.

Every year we ask you, the readers, for your opinion on the best in Beijing dining at the Reader Restaurant Awards. We value your opinion very highly but we thought you'd also value the opinion of the experts so we canvassed a select few. Here's part three of their picks (and a little introduction as to why we consider them to be experts). Bon appetit.

Brazilian producer and DJ Gui Boratto studied architecture, but abandoned a prospective career in construction for a life in music. We asked him a few questions as he readied himself to headline this weekend’s INTRO Electronic Music Festival (May 26).

Remember when personality tests were based on a handful of weird black ink stains? Well, they’re a lot more fun nowadays. American neurologist Allan R. Hirsch, director of the Smell & Taste Research and Treatment Foundation,  has spent nearly two decades studying the connection between the food we eat and our psyches – linking taste and smell preferences to our daily behaviors and choices. The doctor's studies have been published in many books such as What’s Your Food Sign?, Life’s a Smelling Success and What Flavor is Your Personality? The last one includes many tests and since the weather is glorious, we’ve chosen the most refreshing of them all, the ice cream personality test. What’s your favorite flavor? Apparently, it might be more revealing than you'd like.