A Chinese metals and mining company has invested nearly 1 billion dollars into replicating an entire Austrian scenic village just an hour away from Huizhou city, in subtropical southern China.

Nestled deep in the breathtaking Northern Limestone Alps, the village of Hallstatt is one of Austria’s most popular tourist attractions. Featuring a rich culture and history dating back to prehistoric times, and gorgeous natural surroundings, this unique piece of heaven draws in hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. Did I say unique? I meant once unique, because Chinese company China Minmetals Corporation has recently completed a replica of the iconic Austrian village in a scenic location, close to the city of Huizhou. The cost of this knock-off project was around $940 million. The Chinese have always been known for their skill in creating knock-offs, from designer clothes to smartphones, and fueled by China’s economic growth, their projects are becoming even more ambitious. They started out by copying iconic landmarks from around the world, then they moved to whole districts inspired by western civilization  and now they’re building replicas of entire settlements. I’m betting they’ll be replicating entire countries pretty soon.

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Would you be brave enough to spend a night in an old mortuary chapel surrounded by dozens of graves? One English family is more than happy to sleep in such a house every night, and say it’s actually their dream home.

Jayne Stead and partner Mike Blatchford didn’t seem to mind the creepy graves and spooky statues when they decided to move into an old cemetery keeper’s lodge, in Southampton, England. The cemetery didn’t put us off. We don’t spook easily, in fact I love watching scary films and television shows,” 52-year-old Jayne told reporters. When we first had a look around it was really run down, there were graves everywhere but it never really felt scary, there was very nice feeling about the place.” Self-employed builder Mike Bletchford spend a whole year and about £100,000 ($160,000) turning the chapel into a home for his family, and today you couldn’t tell the living room was once a mortuary… But, while they’ve never seen a ghost in their unusual home, the couple admit they have witnessed some bizarre occurrences:  “I’ve been sitting on my own in the living room and I’ve felt like there was someone standing behind me a few times,” Ms Stead said. “I’ve also found the dog barking at nothing in the corner of the room, but it’s not scary.”

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54-year-old Marla Lopez, from New York City, says the supermarket snack aisle has become her dinner aisle, as she will only consume three types of foods (potato chips, white breads and milk), and has never even tried fruits or vegetables.

Recently featured on Good Morning America, Lopez said her picky eating started as a baby, when she would gag on her baby food, and today, foods that most people consider mouth-watering, like spaghetti, sandwiches or omelets are just repulsive to her. Not to mention fresh produce – “When I look at this, I don’t see food. I would no sooner eat any of this, than I would your shoe,” she told correspondent Linsey Davis about fruits and vegetables. When it comes to her favorite food, there’s no doubt in Marla’s mind: potato chips. “They’re so salty, and fresh, and potato-y, I love them,” she said. Her daily diet is primarily made up of three basic foods: milk, white breads and potatoes. She enjoys eating ice-cream, crackers, pancakes, tortillas, chips and french fries. Sometimes she spices up her heart-stopping meals with a few slices of crispy bacon.

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The Pearly Kings and Queens of London, commonly referred to as “pearlies”, are an organised charitable tradition of working class culture in London, England. They raise funds to provide a better way of living for those less fortunate, but they’re best known for their flashy outfits decorated with thousands of pearl buttons.

Pearlies can be traced back to the year 1875, when the organisation was founded by Henry Croft, a 13-year-old street sweeper and rat catcher who dedicated his life to raising money to help children raised in orphanages. Henry himself was an orphan, and after he left the orphanage, at age 13 he became fascinated by London’s costermongers, a guild of colorful street traders who always helped one of their own when he was in trouble. They would organize a “whip round”, collecting money to help fellow costermongers get back on their feet. Traditionally, costers elected Kings’ to lead them against bullies seeking to drive them from their’place of business. They all wore clothes decorated with pearl buttons so they could easily be identified. The buttons were sewn down the outside leg seam of their pants, from the knee down to the ankle, on the pockets of their waistcoats and the front of their caps. Henry was fascinated both by their lifestyle and their dress code and decided to take their fashion style to a new level by decorating a whole suit with pearly buttons, while at the same time raising money for various causes. He became an attraction wherever he went, and one point he was so popular that Hospitals and other charities started asking him to collect money for their causes. But he needed help in his quest to help the sick and poor, and it help from his costermonger friends, who later became known as the Pearly Kings and Queens of London.

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It’s not the kind of job students dream of during university years, but for 22-year-old Jamie Fox being a human scarecrow in a rape field really is a great gig. It gives him the chance to sit down, read a book and even improve his ukelele-playing skills.

Jamie graduated from Bangor University this summer, with a degree in music and English, but until he finds a job he likes in the music business, he’s more than happy to put on a bright orange suit and play a scarecrow in a rape field, in Norfolk, England. “The farmer said to me, ‘Bring a deckchair and a good book’,” Mr. Fox says, and that’s exactly what he did. Now he just enjoys the peace and quiet, and the fresh air while catching up on some reading, listening to podcasts and playing the ukelele during his daily 8-hour shifts. “I get to sit and read for a lot of the time but whenever I see the partridges, I have to get up and scare them off,” the young man said. “A couple of my friends in busier, more generously-paid jobs, are slightly envious.” And for good reason, who wouldn’t want to earn £250 ($400) a week just sitting around in the great outdoors?

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With the Halloween season fast approaching, there’s probably no better way to get into the holiday spirit than hunting a werewolf in the a pitch black forest of Droitwitch, near Birmingham, along with seven terrified friends.

In the last year or so, zombies have dominated the monster charts, but for this year’s Halloween, the folks at Chillisauce.co.uk have decided to give the all but forgotten werewolf a chance to strike fear into the hearts of men, in their Overnight Werewolf Hunting Experience. If you were watching movies like Underworld, and wondered what it would be like to hunt one of these furry creatures on their on turf, wonder no more, because now you ca experience it first hand, just by heading over to Droitwitch, England, for a real-life overnight event. Here’s the background story for the big night: “Deep in the heart of the countryside, near Birmingham, Farmers have reported unusual losses of livestock, and missing person reports are flooding the local papers. Rumors surfaced of a Special Ops team disappearing 24 months ago – the only clues left were a garbled radio message, and a mangled corpse.” It’s up to you and your teammates to succeed where other have failed – take on the cunning and fierce werewolf and try to outwit him.

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In what can only be described as a titanic effort, boat-model enthusiast Jason King, from England, has spent two and a half years building an exact 1:100 scale replica of the Titanic. The 40-year-old used all kinds of scrap materials, from old clockworks to broken VCRs and managed to finish his masterpiece on April 15, exactly 100 years after the real Titanic sunk.

Titanic buffs have built replicas of the famous boat before, but Jason King wanted his to be perfect, right down to the number of benches on its deck. To pull off his perfect 1:100 replica, the man actually bought 150 books on the Titanic and consulted every photo of the vessel he could find. Jason knew most people would never notice the tiny details, but he wanted to make sure no one could ever “pick holes in it”. So he painstakingly recreated every single part of the original Titanic to scale, right in hid home study. Although he admits he had some model experience behind him, the Titanic project still took him two and a half years to complete. But that actually kept him out of his wife’s way, so that made her happy.

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Chen Guanming, a 57-year-old farmer from China, spent over two years travelling about 60,000 kilometers, through 16 countries, enduring floods, war zones and extreme temperatures,  to reach London in time for the games and “spread Olympic spirit”.

The 2012 London Olympic Games may have ended, but remarkable stories related to the monumental event are still popping up. One such story is that of Chen Guanming, a simple farmer from a village in China’s Jiangsu province, who traveled all the way to London the only way he could afford to, by rickshaw. The daring traveler said he was inspired to go on this epic journey when he watched the English Prime-Minister accept the Olympic flag, in 2008, and the media invited those watching the live broadcast to the next edition of the games. Chen took that invitation quite seriously, and in 2009, he started putting all his papers in order and preparing for an unforgettable adventure. His long rickshaw ride began on May 23, 2010, in the village where he grows rice and other crops, and took him through 16 different countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan or Italy.

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We live in such a busy world that some people don’t even have the time to go to church anymore. Luckily, there’s the Pray-O-Mat, a converted old photo booth that features 300 pre-recorded prayers and incantations in 65 different languages, and lets you get your blessing on the go.

Waiting for the service at the local church or temple takes time, and in this day and age that’s a valuable commodity. But thanks to German artist Oliver Sturm, you don’t have to skip out on getting closer to the supreme being you happen to be worshiping. Known as the “Gebetomat” in Germany, the ingenious device has been branded as a “Pray-O-Mat” for its transition to England, where it’s gotten quite a lot of attention since being installed at the University of Manchester, as part of a study into “multi faith spaces”.

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I know what you’re thinking, we’re all pretty much addicted to water, but we don’t feel like drinking it every moment of every day, and we certainly don’t consume over six gallons of it, daily. But Sasha Kennedy does, and that definitely makes her a water addict.

Drinking plenty of water is generally regarded as healthy advice, but they say too much of a good think can sometimes be bad for you, and 26-year-old Sasha Kennedy, from Essex, England, is certainly overdoing it. The young mother of two says she drinks about 25 liters of water a day, and can hardly go one hour without water, even at night. Because of her strange addiction, Sasha is forced to carry bottles of water with her, everywhere she goes, and has to use the bathroom up to 40 times a day.

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While most people are trying to remove hair from their bodies, others are more than happy to put it on, in the form of fashionable dresses.

English hairdresser Jodie Breeds has recently created a dress made entirely from human hair, which was worn by Miss England finalist Holly Lyons on the catwalk of the beauty pageant. Jodie apparently came up with the idea for the dress while contemplating how to represent her hair-salon in the Miss England contest. “My business is about hair and beauty so I wanted to represent what we’re about here. So I designed a hair dress, I sketched out the design and my aunty, Margaret Jenner, who’s a dressmaker, made it. It took about six hours altogether,” the hairdresser said. The “blonde” dress was made from hair donated by the salon’s clients and about 10 rows of hair extensions.

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Let’s face it, for most of us learning Chinese really is a Herculean task, but SexyMandarin.com, an unconventional online school, tries to make things easier by using lingerie-clad models as teachers.

China’s official language, Mandarin, or Putonghua, has around 900 million native speakers, and 1,4 billion speakers worldwide, and as China’s role in the global economy becomes more important, the number of people trying to learn the language is also on the rise. But Mandarin is known as one of the toughest languages in the world, and just looking at the intricate symbols you can tell mastering it won’t be easy. But one online language school has apparently found an ingenious way of making Mandarin more accessible – sexy lingerie-wearing teachers. I wonder why I didn’t think of that…

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Philippa Garfield, from London, England, loves mayonnaise so much she will eat it with pretty much anything, and even wash her hair with it.

We’ve featured some pretty weird addictions here on Oddity Central, from the guy addicted to sausages, to the woman who loved drinking her own urine, but Philippa Garfield takes things to a whole other level. While mayo might not be the strangest thing a person can become addicted to, it’s the way she uses it that makes her story really bizarre. Although she loves eating mayo and pours it over anything she eats, and even in her morning coffee, Philippa also uses the fatty condiment as a cheap moisturizer and conditioner for her hair. She also sees it as the perfect alternative to shaving cream.

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Located in the small backyard of a family-owned property in Wallsall, England, is one of the most incredible-looking gardens in the world. The Four Seasons Garden may not be as large as other famous English gardens you may have visited, but it certainly makes up in beauty and charm.

There are hundreds, probably thousands of breathtaking gardens all over Europe, but most of them were designed and looked-after by teams of professional gardeners, at a considerable cost. The Four Seasons Garden, created by self-taught gardeners Tony and Marie Newton, started out as a hobby, but slowly grew into one of the most popular suburban  gardens in Britain. 20 years ago, the couple from West Midlands decided to transform their traditional garden into a stunning display of creative gardening. Tony hated weeding, but loved building things, while his wife Marie just loved plants, so together they set out to create Four Seasons, their version of the ideal backyard garden.

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Back in 1991, Marc Quinn started one of the most bizarre art projects in history – making detailed self-portraits from his own frozen blood. He has been making a new one every five year or so, since then. Yes, they’re creepy, but think of it this way – it must be reassuring for Mark to know that if he ever needs a transfusion, he’s got a few gallons of blood he can use.

Marc Quinn created his “Self ” series as a means of recording the changes of his face throughout the years, such as countenance and ageing, and if you look closely at the four blood portraits he has made so far, you’ll notice his face has indeed matured over time. Of course, he could have used a more common material for his artworks, but the message wouldn’t have been as powerful as using his own blood. According to Scientific American magazine, “by crafting these heads out of his own blood, Quinn reconnects us to the the fact that in the fullness of time, no artist’s attempt at immortality through self-portraiture will prevail. And of course the series will presumably end in the course of the artist’s life, so the artwork’s time-dimension has a death of sorts as well.” Read More »