Carl Setzer, owner of Great Leap Brewing -- one of the primary organizers of the Craft Beer Festival on Friday and Saturday at Galaxy Soho -- has informed us that Galaxy Soho is now allowing the Beijing LGBT Center to have an official presence at the second annual Craft Beer Festival this Friday and Saturday.
Two days ago, That's Beijing reported that SOHO sent a message to the organizers of the beer festival that the LGBT Center was not welcome at the event because they "clashed with the architecture." That statement was apparently "the result of one bigoted mid-level manager," Setzer told us over email.
That's Beijing dropped a bombshell yesterday, reporting that Galaxy Soho's management apparently doesn't want the city's LGBT Center to have an official presence at the Craft Beer Festival this Friday and Saturday. Specifically:
After (beer festival organizers) submitt[ed] their festival proposal – which included a description of a LGBT Center booth to the Galaxy Soho management, they were informed that the Center’s representatives would not be allowed access to the venue’s premises, over concerns that LGBT members would not fit with the the site’s architecture ("和我们的建筑 不太吻合").
We're not ones to fawn over foreigners who speak Chinese good*, but we give plaudits where it's due: check out Jesse Appell performing a stand-up act in Chinese on Saturday as part of the Bookworm's The Humor Section, a monthly comedy event hosted by Des Bishop. (You might remember Appell as the Fulbrighter behind the Youku sensation Laowai Style -- and a recent guest on the Sinica Podcast -- who has since gone on to found the website Laugh Beijing with the goal of "connecting China and other cultures through comedy.")
We love that term, wish we would’ve thought of it ourselves. Zombie commuters. Commuters because they’re trying to get somewhere. Zombies because you’d have to be brain-dead to drive into traffic in Beijing. As SCMP puts it: “It’s like a scene out of American television show The Walking Dead, said a microblogger on Sina Weibo, after photos... Read more »
David Beckham arrived in Beijing yesterday, kicking off his second tour of China as soccer ambassador. (His first trip, in March, saw him hilariously whiff on a free kick.) The positive publicity couldn't have come soon enough, considering the Chinese national team's humiliating 5-1 thrashing at the hands and feet of Thailand's youth team on Saturday. What was one of the first things Becks did?
Join Sina Weibo, of course. Check out his first post:
We're launching a podcast! On the occassion of Episode 1, featuring Frank Yu, The Creamcast hosts John Artman and The Good Doctor are here to answer some questions.
That was quite the collective experience, Beijing.
An hour ago, a dam in the sky broke. Rain turned into pellets of ice, the sound of its steady assault only interrupted by thunderclap that set off car alarms. One imagines Qu Yuan sitting somewhere with his feet propped up, enjoying the show.
As quickly as the storm came, it departed -- but not before the sun shone out of a hole while the clouds were wrung dry. Now it is quiet, the singing of birds and rustling leaves beginning to fade amid the resumption of human activity, vehicles, construction.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noted before how beautiful Beijing is when it's not, um, foggy.
Yesterday evening, before the rains came once more, we were treated to this sight:
This is first-class: on a plane stuck on the Beijing airport tarmac for three hours yesterday, a quartet of musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestras took out their instruments, gathered in the aisle, and serenaded passengers. The music starts at the 1:11 mark in the above.
![Badminton Controversy! Shuttlers Accused Of Deliberately Losing [UPDATE]](http://beijingcream.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Badminton-pair-150x150.jpg "Badminton Controversy! Shuttlers Accused Of Deliberately Losing [UPDATE]")
