Cheese and ice tea doesn’t sound like a particularly tasty combination, but just try telling that to the thousands of people all across China standing in line for up to five hours to get their hands on a cup of it. Cheese tea is a nationwide sensation, making it hard to believe that it was created by a guy in his early 20s with no real knowledge of tea.

Only a few months ago, Hey Tea, the company behind China’s insanely popular cheese ice tea, was a small street-side shop in Jiangmen, Guangdong, but today they have over 50 branches in Guangdong Province alone, as well as new venues in bustling urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing. They are growing at an astonishing rate, but it’s still not enough to satisfy demand for their bizarrely-sounding cheese tea. People still have to spend at least 2 hours, and, in some cases, up to 5 hours in line to get their hands on a cup. It’s apparently so good that busy people pay others to wait in line for them, and the company sometimes has to hire private security to keep the lines moving and hustlers from cutting in line.

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Vegetable smoothies are not exactly everyone’s favourite treat, but one amateur artist has come up with a way to make them more appealing – by decorating them with intricate designs, using only natural ingredients.

Hazel Zakaryia‘s edible artworks may not make her smoothies tastier, but they definitely make them prettier to look at. Using only wood skewers and a kitchen knife, she painstakingly paints over the thick fruit and vegetable base with edible “paints” made from ingredients like turmeric, blue matcha, milk, cream and and butterfly pea powder. The results are so impressive that it’s hard to believe Zakaryia is not a professional food artist, but a market analyst who likes to spend her free time entertaining her artistic side.

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We often hear about the insane amounts of trash we as a species currently generate, but words and figures don’t make a very big impact on most people. Images work much better, so one French artist decided to actually show just how much trash a single human being generates over time. To do that, he stopped throwing away recyclable trash for four years.

Antoine Repessé stopped throwing away recyclable waste like plastic bottles, toilet paper tubes or newspapers back in 2011, storing it in his apartment, instead. That wasn’t a big issue at first, but as time went by, trash started covering the floor of his home, and soon began piling up and covering every available space. After four years of collecting trash, Repessé’s apartment ended up looking like the home of one of those extreme hoarders you see on TLC.

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Bas de Groot has always been a big fan of milk, drinking 3 to 4 liters of it every day, but he truly became fascinated with it after tasting raw farm milk for the first time. The strong, layered flavors inundated his senses and left him wondering what milk from different regions of the Netherlands tastes like. As the world’s only milk sommelier, Bas now travels the globe, tasting raw milk, and educating people about its special properties and benefits.

Up until just a week ago, I though the word “sommelier” only referred to wine, but then I read about Martin Riese, America’s first and only water sommelier, and today I learned there is also such a thing as a milk sommelier. Bas de Groot is the only person in the world to hold such a title, and while, unlike the best wine sommeliers, he is not yet able to recognize certain milks by flavor alone, he can detect certain differentiating notes based on the cows’ diet and the soil they feed off of.

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People usually visit cafes for a dose of energy-boosting caffeine to alleviate tiredness and keep themselves from falling asleep, but Mr. Healing, a popular cafe chain in South Korea actually encourages people to lie down, take a break, and even get some shut-eye.

Mr. Healing bills itself as a relaxation cafe, a place where people can come in, order a drink and lie down a comfortable massage chair, where they can even take a short nap to the soothing sound of ambient or classical music, with pleasant and relaxing scents inundating their senses. The experience is so popular among Koreans that the chain has expanded to 47 different venues throughout the Asian country.

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Mokase is the world’s first smartphone case that also serves users a warm shot of espresso whenever and wherever they want. It’s aimed at people who are always on the go, whose hectic lifestyle prevents them from stopping by a coffee shop or even a vending machine for a dose of caffeine.

Smart K, the Italian company that came up with the concept for Mokase, claims that they were looking for a way to make coffee available anywhere, and pairing it with the smartphone just made the most sense. “We thought, ‘how to make it always available? Why not join it to a gadget that is already a piece of our lifetime?’ the smartphone is the answer,” Smart K stated in a press release.

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In 1991, Anil and Pamela Malhotra bought a 55 acres of unused farmland in Karnataka, India, and started planting native trees on it. Over the last 25 years, their small forest has turned into a 300-acre wildlife sanctuary that hundreds of endangered plants, animals and birds call home.

Anil and Pamela met and married in New Jersey, USA, during the 1960s. They both shared a love for wildlife, and after visiting Hawaii on their honeymoon, they fell in love with the archipelago’s lush forests and fascinating fauna. They bought some land and decided to settle there. “That is where we learnt the value of forests and realized that despite threats of global warming no serious efforts were being made to save forests for the future,” Anil said.

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Tacos are generally low-cost fare in Mexico – you can buy one from street stalls for as low as 10 pesos (¢50) – so how can one cost as much as a fully optioned family car?

Juan Licerio Alcala, the executive chef at the Grand Velas Los Cabos Resort, a luxury vacation destination in Baja California, and the creator of the world’s most expensive taco, says that the mind-blowing $25,000 price tag of this delicacy is justified by “the technique and the harmony that you will lift from the plate”. That’s a pretty vague explanation, but he assures those interested in sampling his creation that “it’s worth it”.

But if you don’t feel like taking Licerio at his word with 25 grand on the line, maybe the list of ingredients will give you a better idea of what you can expect from the world’s most expensive taco. To make the opulent dish, the Mexican chef takes a corn tortilla speckled with 24 carat gold flakes, which he then fills with Kobe beef, langoustines, Almas Beluga caviar and black truffle brie cheese. Then, the taco is dressed with a salsa based on Morita chiles and Kopi Luwak coffee, before being sprinkled with some edible gold flakes.

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Shanghai-based artist Hong “Red” Yi is well known for her use of unconventional materials, and her latest masterpiece – a portrait of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made with 20,000 meticulously arranged sunflower seeds – is worthy of her reputation.

Inspired by Ai WeiWei’s quote – “the seed is a household object but at the same time it is a revolutionary symbol” – Red sprinkled 20,000 sunflower seeds onto a white canvas and painstakingly arranged them all by hand to recreate Weiwei’s famous portrait with his hands stretching his eyes wide open. Remarkably, she managed to capture his features in great detail, just like she had managed to do with other unusual mediums in the past.

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Zarko Hrgic, a former steelworker from Bosnia, has been living in a small riverside cave near the town of Zenica for nearly a decade. He survives on food picked out of dumpsters and leftovers donated by kind souls as he waits to turn 65 and collect his due pension so he can hopefully turn his life around.

In his youth, Zarko worked as a steelworker in Zenica, but decided to try his luck in Germany after his marriage broke down 30 years ago. He worked odd jobs for many years, but 10 years ago he was deported back to Bosnia for staying and working in Germany illegally. Unfortunately, Zarko’s apartment had been destroyed during the Bosnian War (1992 – 1995) so he had no home to come back to. With no savings to buy a new place, and no one to turn to for help, Hrgic eventually ended up in a small mountainside cave on the bank of Babina River that had once been used by miners to store explosives. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement, but he has been living there for 10 years.

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A London-based brewery has recently launched a unique service that uses cutting edge genetic profiling to create “the world’s most personalised beer”, based on the client’s DNA profile. And it “only” costs £25,000 ($30,550).

Ciaran Giblin, the brewmaster of Meantime Brewery, was the world’s first brewer to have a beer tailored to his own DNA, and was so satisfied with the result that he teamed up with a personal genetics company called 23andMe to offer this bespoke service to other beer enthusiasts with money to spare.

“Having been aware of the potential of at-home genetic mapping, I sent a simple saliva sample to 23andMe; the results gave me the tools I needed to develop a recipe based on the elements my senses are most attuned to enjoy,” Giblin said. “I’m delighted with the result and opportunity it has given us to really push the boundaries of innovative, personalised brewing.”

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It’s getting and harder and harder for beggars to survive on spare change handouts these days. People have become too reliant on alternative payment options to carry cash around with them, and those that still have a few coins in their pockets are often afraid that recipients will just spend it on alcohol, drugs or cigarettes. However, a couple of Dutch advertising professionals have come up with an intriguing solution – a contactless payment jacket for beggars and homeless people.

Developed by Carsten van Berkel and Stefan Leendertse of N = 5, an Amsterdam-based advertising agency, the contactless payment jacket allows people to donate 1€ to the wearer using their contactless smart card. The unusual clothing item has a card reader sewn into it, and in order to donate 1€ to the wearer, all you have to do is hold the card close to the jacket for a few moments, and the sum is automatically debited from your bank account. The contactless payment jacket also comes with an LCD screen which constantly displays instructions of use.

“People have less cash in their pockets,” says Jan Jesse Bakker, the designer of the jacket. “And if you have a single euro on you and give it to a homeless person, then you do not know what happens to it.” That’s one of the big advantages of the contactless payment jacket. You’re not giving cash to a total stranger to do with it what he pleases. Instead, the fixed sum (one euro) goes into a bank account managed by a homeless shelter, and can only be used to purchase a hot meal, pay for a bath or spend a night at a homeless shelter (many such centers in the Netherlands require a contribution of 5€ per night). Homeless people who really want to turn their life around can also save money for various job certification courses or a down-payment for a home. “We can offer the homeless more than just a warm Christmas,” Bakker adds. “We give them back prospects.”

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New Mexico-based artist Justin Crowe first incorporated cremated human ashes into a dinnerware set, last year, as part of an art project, but after his friends learned about it and asked him to create bespoke items for them, he decided to turn the idea into a business. Today, his company, Chronicle Cremation Design, offers people the chance to keep their loved ones close by having their ashes incorporated into everyday items like coffee cups, bowls or candle holders.

“I wanted to create a dinnerware set that infuses a sense of mortality into everyday life,” Crow says about his original idea of mixing human ashes into tableware. In 2015, he purchased 200 human bones from a bone dealer, crushed them into a fine powder and mixed them into a coating glaze for a set of functional plates, cups and bowls. He ended up using them for an unconventional dinner party, with the guests eating off of repurposed human remains.

Interestingly, while searching for human bones for his artistic project, Crow put up an ad on Craigslist, asking for about two cups of ashes for $35. He got three responses on the first day,one of which was from a woman who threatened to have him investigated, quoting the Bible and telling him he was going to hell. “It’s a really polarizing idea,” the artist admits.

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An IKEA store in Shanghai, China claims it has been forced to enforce special rules in order to keep elderly freeloaders from virtually taking over the place for hours at a time and engaging in blind dating sessions.

IKEA is very popular in China. Some people love the furniture mega-stores so much that they spend whole days in them without buying a single item. A few years ago we reported on a bizarre trend that involved people simply coming to IKEA and sleeping on the comfortable beds and sofas on display for hours, or just walking around and enjoying the free air conditioning. This kind of thing has been going on in China for the past 15 years, since the chain arrived in the Asian country, and it’s still very popular today. But it’s apparently not the only problem the Swedish retailer has been facing. Recently, an IKEA store in Shanghai has been dealing with a large group of elderly people that frequently spends hours in its popular cafe without buying anything.

Chinese media reports that dozens sometimes hundreds of elderly men and women meet up at the IKEA cafe in Shanghai every week, for long blind-dating sessions. They stay there for hours without buying any foods or drinks, and act like they own the place. According to a notice board put up by the Shanghai store, the group has been seriously affecting the cafe’s operations with their “uncivilized behavior”. Among the cited offences, the notice mentions “taking up seats for long hours, bringing outside food and tea, speaking loudly, spitting, and having quarrels and fights.”

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A thoughtful husband in Singapore recently ended up fighting to save his marriage after buying three Pokemon plush toys as a surprise for his wife, a big Pokemon Go fan.

The poor guy, known only by his handle – featherlit – on online marketplace Carousell, posted an ad on October 12, pleading with people to get three Snorlax plushies off his hands and help him save his marriage. In the item description section, he wrote how he decided to buy the adorable plush toys for his wife, as she was always talking about how “cute and dumb” the Pokemon character looked. So without giving the much thought, he went online and ordered three plush Snorlax figures.

Featherlit was expecting to receive miniature versions of the Pokemon that they could set on the living-room coffee table as decorations, but to his great surprise, the three Snorlaxes tuned out to be life-sized, with each one measuring around 1.5 meters tall. But that was nothing compared to the shock he got when his wife flew into a rage, after seeing most of their living space taken up by the huge plush toys. He was forced to put them up for sale, after the spouse threatened “to move back to her mom’s home” if he didn’t get rid of them.

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