What is TaoTie (饕餮) you ask? Is it mythical beast capable of swallowing you whole? A fierce and cruel person? A voracious eater? A gourmand? Well, it’s all of those things. But now, TaoTie is Laonei’s fresh look into fine dining in Beijing. We’re not talking about the old expat standby’s like Kro’s Nest or The Tree (don’t get me wrong…these are both great places). But we are more interested in authentic, healthy, clean, and relatively cheap Chinese food that most expats aren’t aware even existed. And it can be quite hard to find a restaurant that fits all the criteria. So we have scoured the streets to find the best of the best.

There are strict requirements for a local restaurant to be chosen for TaoTie; the food has to be exceptionally good and offer something that you can’t find at just any run-of-the-mill restaurant. Before we shoot a TaoTie episode, we sample a wide variety of dishes to make sure they are up to our 好吃/不贵 standards.So keep your eye out for new episodes of TaoTie coming soon and let us know what you think!

To ring in the Spring Festival, we have done a bit of Spring cleaning here at Laonei. And it’s about time; the old version was more about being ‘老’ than it was about being ‘内.’ Anyhow, we threw out some of the old features that weren’t up to our quality standards and we added a few new features. A new design was used to improve the overall feel of Laonei as well. 

We hope the new version is easier to use, more useful, and more aesthetically pleasing. While we have made tons of changes to the site, not everything is perfect and we still have plans to make the site even better in the near future. Help us find any bugs that have slipped by our overworked IT team! We have cool prizes (see picture below) for any awesome Laoneis that help us find bugs!!! 

Happy New Year from the whole Laonei Team!

It has come to the attention to some of the Laonei staff that the new logo, which  is a “内” written in the seal-style of the Qin Dynasty (篆书- zhuàn shū), looks something a prophylactic and/or phallus. Well, we here at Laonei do not condone the use of sexual imagery for marketing purposes, but we do encourage the use of condoms, whether used for birth control, STD prevention, or water balloons.

With condoms in mind, I headed on over to the Jissbon website and was pleasantly surprised with their “sexual knowledge” section (性知识). I picked up a few new vocabulary words in the process, along with their descriptions in Chinese. Here are just a few (visit the website for a more complete list, though without translations):

安全套 (ān quán tào) - condom

前戏 (qián xì) - foreplay

手淫 (shǒu  yín) - masturbate

舔阴 (tiǎn  yīn) - cunnilingus

吹萧 (chuī  xiāo) - fellatio

G点 (G diǎn) - Need I explain?

69 式 ·体位 (liù  jiǔ  shì  tǐ  wèi) -It’s all about the numbers

Here at Laonei, we are in the process of making some big improvements to the site. We figured the best way to ring in the holidays was to give Laonei users the gift of a new and improved site.

But we need your help. We want to know what you think is important information to have while living in China. Help us reach our goal of making Laonei.com the most useful and aesthetically pleasing site in Beijing!

Two of the English-challenged studs from our IT team made a video especially for you! They couldn’t read an English script, so we put it in Chinese characters. Check out the video, Experiment in Transliteration, and make sure to take the questionnaire!

Not too long ago, the Laonei Team threw a bluesy bash to celebrate the photo contest winners.

The party was held in quite possibly the snazziest bar/live music venue in 798 Art District  - The Acoustic House. The sound system was a musician’s delight, bumpin’ the blues a la Mr. Mojo, a veritable staple in the Beijing blues scene. There was also some kitchy prizes (some quite useful, like the baijiu and cigarettes seen in the video below) and free Qingdao to boot. And I ought not forget about the cool people and photographs on display!