There’s a hilarious trend sweeping Chinese social media these days and people can’t get enough of it. Videos of people sneaking in their own raw ingredients into hotpot restaurant and dropping them into bowls of simmering broth have been going viral since December.

If you’re ever been to a Chinese restaurant, you probably know all about the hotpot. A staple of Chinese cuisine, it basically consists of a simmering pot of soup stock and a selection of raw ingredients that patrons drop into the stock to be cooked right at their table. Hotpot restaurants are all the rage in China, and they usually offer all the raw ingredients you need for a delicious meal, but a new trend has people sneaking in their own ingredients, which range from mushrooms and herbs to whole chickens and fish.

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A convenience store owner in Osaka, japan, sparked a lot of controversy recently when he decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s. Appaerntly that was a pretty big deal in a country where convenience stores a traditionally open 24/7, all year long.

While convenience stores are still pretty popular in the United States, they are nothing compared to the so-called “konbini” stores found on every corner of every street in urban Japan. They are beacons of hope that make life easier for the average person, offering a wide range of services (ATMs, Wi-Fi, printing, delivery services, etc.), as well as groceries, all in one place, day and night. In fact, the thing that makes Japanese convenience stores so convenient is that they are open all 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, making it possible for anyone to pick up some groceries, pay the bills or get a quick bite to eat,whenever they need to. So when one convenience store owner decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s, it made national news.

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The Thammasat Khlongluang Wittayakom School, in Pathum Thani, Thailand was forced to stop using decibel meters to measure students’ loudness while singing the national anthem, after getting some serious backlash online.

Singing the national anthem as loudly as possible in front of the flagpole every morning is apparently a big deal at Thai schools, so one learning institution got the bright idea to track the loudness of the students using a decibel measuring mobile app. If the students’ singing registered at over 85 decibels, they would be given the green light and be dismissed to head to their classrooms. However, if their singing was only between 80 and 84 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem again two more times, as punishment. If the loudness was under 80 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem three more times. The measure was supposed to instil discipline in students, but it only sparked outrage in everyone who learned about it.

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When two farmers in China’s Hubei province decided to let their neighbors take a bag or two of their newly-grown white radishes, they had no idea it would cost them their entire 500 tonne harvest, or about $42,000 in cash.

Xu Jiuge, one of the farmers who suffered the shocking loss last month, told the Chutian Metropolis Daily newspaper that he and his partners decided to let their neighbors take a few radishes for home consumption after some of them praised their produce, saying that it tasted great in their winter soups. After all, they only had a few neighbors, and if each took a bag or two of radishes, it didn’t really affect their hundreds of tonnes harvest. But what the farmers didn’t expect was for their neighborly courtesy to turn into a free-for-all that not even the police could stop.

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While still technically in its infancy, the vlogging (video content) industry is incredibly competitive, but while some creators rely on tech or entertainment skills to capture viewers’ attention, one young girl from rural China has become an international star by filming herself perform daily chores.

Li Ziqi is often referred to as an internet phenomenon in China. The 29-year-old not only has millions of dedicated fans in her home country, as well as the approval of the Chinese government for promoting Chinese traditional values, but she has also amassed a following of millions outside her country’s borders. And she’s done it all by gracefully leveraging an impressive array of skills that range from cooking to furniture making, while painting a perfect fairy tale image for her audience. And in a time when Chinese viewers are getting more fed up with work stress and pollution every day, Li Ziqi provides the perfect escape.

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Rather than improve his noodle recipe, a restaurant owner in China’s Guangxi Province would lace his noodles with opium to get patrons addicted and increase the chances of them coming back for more.

The restaurateur’s dirty trick was uncovered by mistake, after someone who ate at his local in Sanjiang Dong Automonous County tested positive for morphine, the active component in opium, during a police inspection. The shocked man insisted that he had not willingly taken drugs, and told investigators that the only thing he had ingested that he couldn’t vouch for was a bowl of noodles at a local restaurant. That’s how police ended up making a surprise visit to the noodle shop in question, where they took a packet of snail powder which tested positive for morphine.

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A Chinese father sparked outrage on social media after it was reported that he made his son beg at a Shanghai train station as punishment for not doing his homework.

Lat Thursday morning, Shanghai police responded to an emergency call about a young boy with a schoolbag on his knees begging for food in a local train station. When officers found the 10-year-old, he was holding a small bowl and asking people for food. Asked how he had gotten there, the child told them that his father had left him at the station about 45 minutes earlier, put the bowl in his hands and told him to beg from strangers as punishment for not doing his homework.

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A Chinese man was recently sued by an Audi dealership in Guilin,in China’s southern Guangxi region, and had to pay a settlement of more than $10,000 after his young daughter casually scratched 10 luxury cars.

The young girl’s father, identified only as Mr. Zhao, reportedly accompanied a friend  to the dealership, bringing his wife and daughter along. They were looking around at the nice cars and listening to interacting with the staff, leaving the 3-year-old girl to her own devices. After understandably becoming bored, the little girl allegedly grabbed a stone and proceeded to scratch doodles onto the paint of no less than 10 Audi vehicles, including  an Audi Q8 valued at nearly 1 million RMB ($142,000).

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A 22-year-old man was recently accused of scratching a BMW sedan at a dealership in Jiangxi City for a very bizarre reason – so his father would be forced to buy it for him according to the “you break it you buy it” principle.

The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Ji Moubing, reportedly visited the BMW dealership on November 25th and expressed interest in buying a dark blue sedan. Staff later told police that Ji acted normally and actually seemed really excited, telling one salesman that his father had promised to buy him a nice car as reward for getting his driver’s license. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse after Ji called his father to tell him what car he wanted.

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Heartbreaking news of a 10-year-old boy in rural Vietnam who refuses to be adopted after losing his whole family, instead living by himself and working in the fields all day, has melted the hearts of millions around the world.

While most 10-year-olds have nothing to worry about but going to school and enjoying their childhood, Dang Van Khuyen spends his days slaving in the fields around his modest home in a remote village in Vietnam, planting vegetables and foraging for things to fill his stomach with. His life has never been easy, losing his mother at a very young age and having to live with his grandmother while his father went away to find a job in construction. However, things got dramatically worse after his father died in an accident at work and his grandmother remarried in another village, as he was left with no support whatsoever.

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If the idea of having dozens of fish nibbling at your toes while you enjoy some traditional Indonesian cuisine sounds intriguing, you may want to check out this unique restaurant in Indonesia’s cultural capital of Yogyakarta.

Located far away from the city center, the Soto Cokro Kembang restaurant originally relied on a relaxing flower garden to attract patrons exhausted by the stress of urban life. However, when the owner’s father had the idea of turning the abandoned cow stalls nearby into a unique aquatic eating space, no one imagined that the quaint eatery would end up attracting people from all around the island nation. Owner Imam Nur says that the attention Soto Cokro Kembang is currently getting in the news and on social media is beyond what he ever imagined.

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He may not have Ace Ventura’s charm or his iconic hairdo, but Sun Jinren is a real-life pet detective in all the ways that matter. When he takes on a lost pet case, he pours all his effort as well as thousands of dollars in expensive equipment in order to find them.

Dubbed China’s first pet detective by the country’s media, Sun Jinren launched his business seven years ago and has since reunited about 1,000 lost pets with their owners. He has a success rate of around 70%, and despite charging a whopping 8,000 yuan ($1,130) per case, clients know his services are worth it. He now has an entire team working for his company and uses all sorts of high-tech gadgets to increase his chances of finding lost pets, including heat detectors, thermal imaging cameras and even an endoscope.

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A property developer in the Chinese city of Changsha has been slammed by homebuyers for deceiving them by promising “high vegetation cover” and “park views”, and delivering a public area covered in a blue plastic material to look like a lake.

To say that homeowners in a new residential complex in central China were less than impressed when they picked up their keys earlier this week would be an understatement. Having been drawn in by developer Changsha Shiji Yujing Real Estate with promises of natural vegetation and a “park lifestyle”, they were expecting the public area to look like an idylic paradise. However, all they got was a fake lake made out of a blue, plastic material, complete with a small timber bridge. The pavement decoration does in fact create the illusion of a lake when seen from above, but it’s not exactly what residents were hoping for.

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Remember that story we ran a few months ago about a man who claimed he cured his terminal cancer with a cheap dog deworming medicine? Well, apparently it recently went viral in South Korea and stocks of the antiparasitic medicine have been depleted.

Back in May, the story of Joe Tippens, an Oklahoma man who allegedly cured his terminal with the help of a $5 dog deworming drug called fenbendazole, went viral. Doctors said the cancer had spread everywhere in his body and he only had about three months to live, but today he is cured and he credits the veterinary medicine for the miracle. The news made headlines all around the world, but it really made a big impact in South Korea, where stocks of fenbendazole have evaporated due to people buying it as a way to prevent or cure cancer.

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A Chinese woman whose violent coughs reportedly resulted in 10 fractured ribs was shocked to hear that her bones had become fragile due to her excessive sunblock use, which caused a severe vitamin D deficiency.

The 20-year-old woman from Zhejiang province, in eastern China, first started experiencing coughing episodes after pulling out a straw mat to sleep on to combat heat during the night. She started coughing that very night, and although her doctor first diagnosed her with a case of allergic asthma, the violent coughs soon revealed an even bigger health concern. After a few days, after particularly violent coughing fits, Xiao Miao (a pseudonym used by Chinese media) experienced severe pain in the left side of her chest, which investigations revealed was caused by several broken ribs.

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