At China’s Most Hardcore High-School Teachers Employ Army-Style Tactics to Best Educate Students

Tucked away in the mountains of China’s Anhui province, in the sleepy little town of Mao Tan Chang, is one of the world’s most intense educational institutions. Over 20,000 students (that’s four times the local population) at Mao Tan Chang High School study day and night with very little rest to prepare for the gaokao, a highly competitive national college entrance exam.

Most of these students come from rural areas as their parents know that acing the dreaded gaokao could open up a host of opportunities, allowing them to escape a farmer’s life. Mao Tan Chang helps them achieve their goals by creating an environment that encourages serious study, and little else. The school’s strategy is simple – everything that isn’t related to academics is banned.

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The Seemingly Normal Dutch Village Where Everyone Suffers from Dementia

The isolated Dutch village of Hogewey, located on the outskirts of the town of Weesp, has only 152 inhabitants who seem to be living a normal life – they eat, sleep, walk around the village and visit shops and restaurants. But in reality, every single one of them is being constantly watched. That’s because Hogewey is actually an elder care facility, and all of its residents suffer from dementia.

‘Dementia Village’ takes care to maintain the illusion that life is normal for the residents. The 152 patients have no idea that their home is a mental institution, nor that their living quarters are constantly monitored. Within the village, residents do not live in wards and there are no long hallways or corridors. Instead, they live in groups of six or seven to a house, with one or two caretakers. The homes are furnished according to the time period when the residents’ short-term memories stopped functioning properly – the 1950s, 1970s, and the 2000s, all accurate down to the tablecloths.

The residents are allowed to freely roam the grounds and admire its landscaped trees and fountains, or rest on the benches. Caretakers are stationed all over the village; 250 full and part time nurses and geriatric specialists wander the town as cashiers, grocery-store attendees, post-office clerks and more. Finances have simply been taken out of the equation, as everything is included in the family’s payment plan.

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Welcome to Ifrane, Africa’s Little Switzerland

Ifrane is a small town and ski resort in Morocco, famous for its European style and its similarity to the tourist haven of Switzerland. Developed by the French in the 1930s, Ifrane is so reminiscent of the Swiss Alps that it is fondly referred to as ‘Africa’s Little Switzerland’.

The town is located at an altitude of 5,460 feet above sea level in the Middle Atlas region. Its neat red-roofed houses, blooming flower beds, lake-studded parks, and snowbound winters present a huge contrast to Morocco’s narrow, maze like streets and old, earth-colored buildings. It is truly a wonder that such lush greenery, cedar and oak forests, and pasturelands can even exist in the midst of the hot and dry climate of the region.

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Dutch Adventurer Plans to Drive to the South Pole in a Tractor

For the past twelve years, this Dutch woman’s to-do list has consisted of only one item – to drive a tractor all the way to the South Pole. That is a rather unusual goal to have, but Manon Ossevoort has worked very hard to make it happen, and the 38-year-old is all set to scratch it off her list this month. When asked if people think she’s crazy, her response was simple: “Only if they haven’t met me.”

Manon’s story actually started in 2005, when she got in a tractor and left her home town in Holland on a 38,000 kilometer road trip through Europe, the Balkans and Africa, finally terminating at the Cape of Good Hope in Cape Town.

She intended for Cape Town to serve as a port to her final destination – Antarctica. Unfortunately, she missed the boat that was supposed to take her there due to various delays. So Manon spent the next few years back home, in Holland – she wrote a book, worked as a motivational speaker, gave birth to a baby girl, and teamed up with tractor makers Massey Ferguson for a ride that could bear the brunt in Antarctica.

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Japanese Artist Creates Amazingly Realistic Miniature Dioramas

Satoshi Araki, an artist from Tokyo, creates highly realistic miniature models of towns, vehicles, and a lot of other objects from everyday life. He is particularly skilled at making small-scale dioramas of chaotic cityscapes that are affected by urban decay, pollution, or warfare.

Satoshi mostly uses styrofoam board to make these incredibly intricate and complex models – he cuts them down to the desired shape and size, paints them, and then glues them together. He explains on his blog that he uses Google Image Search to pull up images that he later uses as a visual reference. These images help him create scenes that are very life-like, down to the smallest detail.

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Meet Chibatman, Japan’s Real-Life Dark Knight

The city of Chiba, in Japan, is home to a real-life superhero who looks almost exactly like the famous Dark Knight of Gotham city. He even wears Batman’s iconic suit and travels on a custom-made Batpod, but his mission is rather different – to bring happiness to the people of Japan.

‘Chibatman’, as our superhero has come to be known, prefers to keep his identity a secret. But we do know that he’s a 41-year-old local welder who likes to fight crime – or in this case, unhappiness – in his spare time. While his costume is store-bought, he built the three-wheeled ‘Chibatpod’ himself, with imported parts worth around $5,700.

Photographs of the caped crusader have been doing the rounds on Twitter for the past three years now. Everytime the citizens of Chiba catch a glimpse of their very own Chibatman, they immediately post a photograph or video of him on various social networks.

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Small Japanese Village Turns Rice Paddies into Awe-Inspiring Works of Art

Inakadate village, located near Hirosaki city in Japan’s Aomori prefecture, is one of the few places in the world where farming and art go hand-in-hand. The village is renowned for its unique form of landscape art created in paddy fields. These artistic paddies are so popular that they attract over 200,000 tourists a year.

For centuries, farming has been the main source of income for the people of Inakadate. The amount of farmland available to the relatively small population of 8,000 villagers is massive. Paddy fields make up over fifty percent of the entire village land. The soil in these lands is so fertile that the yield from the rice crop has consistently been higher than any other village or town in Japan.

In the early 1990s, archeologists discovered that the rice strains of Inakadate were over 2,000 years old. To celebrate this fact, and to make the village more attractive to visitors, the local tourism office hatched a plan – to make use of their abundant production of rice to attract more tourists. And that’s how their amazing rice paddy artworks were born.

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Izhikhothane – South Africa’s Bizarre Money-Burning Sub-Culture

Izikhothane, which loosely translates to ‘brag it’, is a South African subculture of youths who dress themselves in designer clothes they can barely afford. They arrive in minivans at public spots and participate in elaborate dance-offs against rival gangs. During these performances, they indulge in burning wads of cash, destroying their clothes and spilling expensive food and alcohol on the streets. Why, you ask? To show off, obviously.

“To be Izikhothane, you have to be like us. Buy expensive clothes, booze, fame, girls, driving, spending. And when you are dressed in Italian clothing it shows that you’re smart,” said one gang member. In a nation where almost 50 percent of youths are unemployed, this sort of blatantly extravagant act is rather surprising. Most of the Izikhothane are funded by their working class parents with modest incomes.

There’s also a huge generation gap between these youths and their parents. Most of the Izikhothane belong to a generation that grew up after the end of white minority rule, unlike their parents. According to one kid, “Being born free means we can shop where we want and the country is no longer under oppression. We can express our views without being imprisoned.” Some use the extravagance as a means to escape their poverty, and for others it is just a culture of bling.

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Chinese Woman Has Been Wearing Her Wedding Dress Every Day for the Last Ten Years

A 47-year-old Chinese woman is so happy to have found true love that she hasn’t taken off her wedding dress for the past ten years. You might think that’s crazy, but wait till you hear everything she’s been through. At age 18, Xiang Junfeng was kidnapped from her hometown and sold to an elderly man. She was forced to marry him and lived for 15 years in captivity before she found the courage to run away.

A native of Jimo, in China’s Shandong Province, Xiang was sold to a man in the neighboring city of Linyi. He ended up using her as a slave, putting her to work in the fields. After several years of living in captivity, she managed to escape by running to Liujiazhuang village where a local woman helped her. Eventually, the woman turned out to be Xiang’s savior in more than one way. She introduced Xiang to her own brother, Zhu Zhengliang, and the couple tied the knot in 2004. This event made poor Xiang so happy that she’s refused to wear anything but her wedding attire ever since.

Although she got married with just the one dress, Xiang later had three more made – one for each season. “I bought one and made the other three,” she said. “I had only ever known a violent and abusive man and I avoided men until I met my new partner who brought me truly out of my shell and treated me so differently. I couldn’t believe it when he asked me to marry him.”

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Experiencing Life on Mars in the Rocky Red Desert of Utah

Who says you need to go to Mars to know what life could be like over there? Some places on Earth are apparently good enough to simulate the experience. And that’s exactly what a team of experts from Mars Society have done – recreated life on the red planet by dressing in space suits and living in isolation in a rocky Utah desert. The group of researchers lives there on a space research base, surviving on food rations, conducting research experiments and showering just once in three days.

The area surrounding the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is quite similar to the atmosphere on Mars – hot, windy, red, and rocky. Just like in the science fiction movies, every time the team needs to leave the station, they have to pass through an air lock. The team consists of four men and two women, living in a cramped, two-storey hut 40 miles from the nearest town of Hanksville. The crew sleep in small pod-like beds, have very limited contact with the outside world and a very slow internet connection to send only a few e-mails a day.

Most of their communication is with ‘mission control’, who monitor and record data about the crew’s lives every two weeks. This includes details like psychological status, food intake and exercise. According to 27-year-old Mission Commander Lara Vimercati, who is also a NASA biologist, “Everything we do each day must be as though we are on another planet. We have to go through an air lock procedure and suit up before we have any contact with the outside.” Visitors are sometimes allowed; they need to travel to MDRS on a slow buggy (only 5 mph), down an unmarked path filled with rocks.

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Thrill-Seeker Travels All Around the World to Perform Death-Defying Hand-Stands

Scott Young is a thrill seeker unlike any other. Most adventurers are content with just traveling the world, but this young daredevil takes the phrase ‘living on the edge’ to a whole new level. He actually performs handstands on top of skyscrapers and other tall buildings in every city that he visits. Scott climbs to the very edge of buildings up to 40 storeys high (that’s nearly 500 foot) and hangs up-side-down. And get this – he doesn’t use any safety ropes or nets. He only carries a small camera strapped to his foot, to record the vertigo-inducing view below.

25-year-old Scott is a native of Basingstoke, a large town in northeast Hampshire in England. He has been a professional freerunner since the age of 15, which means that he performs stunts like climbing tall urban buildings and jumping between rooftops. Scott has starred in films like The Amazing Spiderman and is now a part of the 3RUN team of acrobats. But he’s currently working on his pet project called ‘Handstands in High Places’. So far, he has filmed himself performing handstands in three countries – England, China and India. His latest pictures are from the edge of an old, derelict 20-storey building in New Delhi. This was by far the most dangerous stunt he’s performed – purely because of the bad condition of the building. But Scott was pretty nonchalant about the whole affair.

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The Baikal Ice Marathon – The Ultimate Winter Endurance Race

The Baikal Ice Marathon is one of the world’s toughest endurance challenges. Over the years, the one-of-a-kind event has seen participants from over 50 countries. These are athletes with a heart of steel – they race across a 42 kilometer course across the completely frozen surface of Baikal, the oldest and deepest freshwater lake on Earth. Every year, the Baikal Ice Marathon is held for a noble cause – the Preservation of Clean Water. This year its 10th edition took place on March 1.

Although the terrain for the marathon is predominantly flat, it is still considered to be one of the world’s 10 most challenging competitions because of the freezing Siberian weather. The cold northern winds and harsh, unpredictable climate is, in fact, the biggest challenge faced by runners. In past marathons conditions have varied in severity – from high winds and biting cold, to a sunny sky with almost no chills. The lake’s surface is another problem; at times it can be hard and uneven, covered in small hills of ice rubble. Geometric springs and seismic activity beneath the ice may weaken it to form holes.

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Azerbaijani Parking Attendant Turns Dusty Cars into Awe-Inspiring Works of Art

For most artists, any surface can be used as a canvas, as this Azerbaijani man beautifully demonstrates by creating complex urban landscapes in the collected dust on cars. He discovered his talent and passion for drawing in dirt at his job as a parking attendant which he has been doing for over 10 years.

During work hours on one of the busiest streets of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, parking attendant Rafael Veyisov wipes off the dust on cars with his fingers, slowly contouring the shapes of tall buildings and flying birds. In his artwork, he generally illustrates real towns to educate people about other countries, but sometimes he also lets his imagination run wild and produces impressive original works. Surprised by his talent, the car owners who regularly leave their vehicles in Rafael’s care, often leave them dirty just to give him an excuse to play around, and take photos of his beautiful artworks.

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Japanese Man Completes 40,000Km Walk Around the World

Masahito Yoshida, 32, recently returned to Shanghai, the city where he started his epic walk around the world, four and a half years ago. He walked a total of 40,000 kilometers across four continents carrying with him a two-wheeled cart full of baggage.

On New Year’s Eve, in 2009, Masahito Yoshida, an average Joe from the city of Tottori, Japan, set out from Shanghai to explore the world on foot. He had always wanted to travel and see all the wonders of the globe, but knew that doing it by plane or train, he would miss the small, sometimes isolated towns of the world, and the people that live in them. So he decided to walk instead. His first destination was Cape Roca, on the Portuguese coast, where he arrived in August of 2010, after covering 16,000 kilometers through central Asia and Europe. He then hopped on a plane to America, where he spent another year walking 6,000 km from Atlantic City, New Jersey to Vancouver, Canada. By the end of 2011 he exhausted most of his travel funds, so he started taking part-time jobs to finance the rest of his trip. From Canada, he flew to Melbourne, Southern Australia, and made his way north, to Darwin, then Singapore and back to Shanghai, China. During his memorable journey, Masahito worn off seven pairs of walking shoes.

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Ultimate Privacy – The House Built in the Middle of a River

Have you ever dreamed of having a home in the middle of nowhere to escape to every now and then? I have. And this house built straight in the middle of the Drina River in Serbia fits the bill perfectly.

Standing on an exposed rock bang in the center of the river, near the town of Bajina Basta, this tiny house has been getting a lot of attention on the internet ever since it was captured on camera last year by Hungarian photographer Irene Becker. Her photo was published by National Geographic as one of the best ‘Photos of the Day’ in August 2012, and ever since then the mysterious and tranquil abode of Drina River has captured the imagination of millions. “I’m so glad that my picture makes this tiny house known to more and more people,” Becker said about her work. But in Serbia, the precariously placed house has been a popular tourist destination for decades, and a symbol of the picturesque Basta region. It was even nominated as one of the Seven Wonders of Serbia.

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