Quirky World: Family’s S&M restaurant whips up excitement
With drinks served in breast-shaped cups and beers opened with bottle openers shaped like a wooden penis, the father and daughter team behind a Beijing S&M restaurant are encouraging customers to mix food with sex.
Owner Lu Lu, a 27-year-old divorcee, said business has been good since opening just under a year ago, with young Chinese streaming in to feast on seafood, such as lobster, under the gaze of mannequins wearing bondage gear.
Lu’s father overcame initial reservations about some of the decor and took charge of the kitchen, dishing up a menu that features items such as ‘Horny’ and ‘Sensuous World’.
“‘Food and sex are the basic desires of humans, and the phrase has not changed in more than 5,000 years,” Lu told Reuters. “‘Release your basic instincts’ and ‘Liberate yourself’ are the two concepts we used as the basis for the restaurant.”
Lu said she was catering to a new generation of educated city residents who are increasingly willing to explore sex.
Chinese society has long left behind the days when talking about sex was taboo, but sexual education in schools remains almost non-existent. The government also keeps a tight rein on what it views as vulgar content on television or online.
Venues like Lu’s can also fall foul of the authorities. But apart from one visit by police, Lu said, she has been left to continue to run her establishment, where inflatable naked dolls sit on shelves and waiters wear aprons with breasts on them.
That may change, though, with Lu planning to ramp up the kinkiness by putting women customers in handcuffs and getting their male companions to feed them.
She also wants to offer customers the chance to whip the waitresses.
Torrential rain has dashed hopes in Romania of setting a Guinness Book world record for Greece’s famous sirtaki dance.
Romanians were attempting to break the world record for the dance made famous in the 1964 movie Zorba the Greek before a storm struck this Black Sea port on Saturday.
Organisers declared the attempt a washout, then had a change of heart and called people back to the beach in the port, 250km east of Bucharest.
The current world sirtaki record was set in Volos, Greece, in 2012, when 5,614 people danced.
Organisers in Romania claim more than 6,000 people took part in Saturday’s record-breaking attempt. Guinness representative Seyda Sibasi Gemici declared the attempt invalid, however, saying it had become too dark to do an accurate count.
A Chinese detergent maker has apologised to black people hurt by an advert in which a black man “washed” by its product was transformed into a fair-skinned Asian man.
Shanghai Leishang Cosmetics Ltd said it strongly shuns and condemns racial discrimination.
But it blamed foreign media for the “over-amplification” of the ad, which first appeared on Chinese social media in March.
The ad was halted after it drew protests this week following media reports.
“We express regret that the ad should have caused a controversy,” the company said. “But we will not shun responsibility for controversial content.
“We express our apology for the harm caused to the African people because of the spread of the ad and the over-amplification by the media.”
The advert for Qiaobi laundry detergent drops shows a black man entering a room and attempting to flirt with an Asian woman. He is carrying a can of paint, wears dirty clothes and has a soiled face.
She feeds him a detergent drop and stuffs his body into a top-loading washer. When the cycle completes, a fair-skinned Asian man in a clean white T-shirt emerges to the delight of the woman.
When speaking to the Global Times newspaper, Mr Wang of Leishang said the critics were “too sensitive,” and the issue of racial discrimination never came up during the production of the video. The ad’s content rekindled discussions on racial discrimination in China, where prejudices against black people are likely to be dismissed.
The full design of the new £5 banknote featuring Winston Churchill will be unveiled this week. The new fiver will be issued in September and in a break from the current paper notes it will be printed on polymer, a thin flexible plastic film, which is seen as more durable and more secure.
The £5 note will be unveiled at Blenheim Palace, Churchill’s birthplace, on Thursday. The current £5 note features prison reformer Elizabeth Fry and the announcement in 2013 that she would be replaced with Churchill caused an outcry as it could have meant that, apart from Queen Elizabeth II, there would be no female faces on the UK’s notes.
It was subsequently announced that novelist Jane Austen would be the face of the new £10 note. Like the new fiver, the new £10 and £20 notes will also be printed on polymer.
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