When 27-year-old business school graduate Mason Wartman quit his Wall Street job to sell $1 pizza slices, to many of his friends it seemed like the anticlimax of a brilliant career. But the man was simply trying to achieve a different sort of greatness with his no-frills pizza shop, Rosa’s Fresh Pizza, in Philadelphia’s Center City. In the past one year, the shop has served 8,500 free slices of pizza to homeless people, by harnessing the generosity of its patrons.

The shop operates by a ‘pay it forward’ system – customers who walk in to buy pizza can also sponsor a slice for a homeless person. In this way, about 30 to 40 homeless people are able to eat for free at Rosa’s every single day.

Even before the pay-it-forward scheme was implemented, Rosa’s Pizza, which is located on an almost vacant block, used to always give away free slices to hungry homeless people in the neighborhood. But one day last March, a customer asked if he could pay for the next homeless person who walked in. Wartman immediately agreed, and then put up a sticky note on the wall, just to keep track of the pre-paid slice.

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The video tour of a Shell Gas Station toilet in the Philippines is making waves on the internet – it has gone viral with over 4 million views on YouTube and nearly 30,000 likes on Facebook. The video was made by Canadian model and TV personality Jason Godfrey; it shows the inside of a pristine toilet that’s so amazing, you’ll probably never want to leave it!

The gas station, located in Tagbilaran City, Bohol, is primarily meant to attract travelers and tourists. In addition to sparkling clean toilets, the restroom also has a very homey ambiance, with lovely paintings adorning the walls, bookshelves that stock reading material to peruse while using the loo, furnished wood and other beautiful decorations. It’s unlike any public toilet I’ve ever been too, that’s for sure.

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Whole wheat flour, spelt and water are the usual ingredients used to make bread, but add a touch of edible gold and you’ve got wealthy clients from all around the world stepping on each others’ toes trying to secure a loaf of the world’s most expensive bread. Made by Pan Piña bakery in the small Spanish village of Algatocin, the ‘gold leaf bread’ costs an unbelievable $150 per 400-gram loaf.

Pan Piña baker and co-owner Juan Manuel Moreno said that he came up with the idea for the bread after he saw the ‘world’s most expensive coffee’ on sale at another shop in the region. So he decided to dazzle up his own bread with a dash of edible gold worth over $100 both inside and on the surface of each loaf. However, he does agree that the shiny metal does nothing to enhance flavor.

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When Gunther Holtorf set out on an 18-month road trip to Africa in 1988, he had no idea his journey would go on for almost three decades. Gunther ended up traveling a whopping 556,000 miles spanning 215 countries in his trusty old car – a Mercedes Benz G Wagon nicknamed ‘Otto’. That’s the equivalent of making two trips from the Earth to the Moon, and then some!

It all started in 26 years ago, when Gunther quit his 30-year service at Lufthansa, met his fourth wife Christine, and together they braved gravel-covered, pothole-ridden roads from their hometown of Bavaria, all the way to Africa. After driving over 62,000 miles across the continent and suffering five bouts of Malaria, they decided to just keep going.

The couple removed the two rear seats in the car in order to make room for a mattress and storage space for clothing, food, tools, spare parts and utensils. After that, there was just no looking back. They made their way through South America, North America, Asia, Australia and Europe, always taking Otto with them wherever they went. In fact, they looked upon their beloved car as the third member of their family.

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Cathy Price, from Preston, Lancashire, has paid a visit to 500 different pubs named ‘Red Lion’ in Britain. In fact, she’s made it her life’s mission to visit every single Red Lion in the UK, which just happens to be the most common pub name in the country. She celebrated her 500th visit last weekend in Bedfordshire, where she visited a Red Lion at Dagnall, near Whipsnade Zoo.

55-year-old Cathy has been touring the nation since 2011, visiting local Red Lions in Milton Bryan, Studham, Upper Sundon, Leighton Buzzard, Great Brickhill and Houghton Regis. She said that she got the idea for the project on a whim: “I was away in the Lake District for the weekend a few years ago and I was watching the Grand National at a pub and I read a sign which said the Red Lion was the most common pub name in the country.”

“I thought they must be absolutely everywhere and that was when I decided I had to see them all,” she explained. “I began on Grand National day, April 9, 2011, and aim to complete the quest as near to Grand National day as I can next year, which will have taken four years.”

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With just a craft knife and a needle, talented Iranian artist Omid Asadi can breathe life into dry, fallen leaves. The 35-year-old, now based in the UK, carves breathtaking silhouettes into fragile brown leaves, creating exquisite pieces of art. Right from celebrity portraits to wild animals, or even random patterns – Omid is an expert at using the natural shape of a leaf to transform it into a wide range of subjects.

“Art for me is the way of looking differently to this world and around myself,” Omid said. “I started to think why nobody paid attention to these beautiful leaves and trod on them, because of their name – if they were called flowers we wouldn’t tread on them at all! I wanted to give the leaves another life and make art from them.”

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I wouldn’t blame you if you thought these were just simple photos of discarded trash. I was fooled as well, until I actually read the story behind them. In reality, these are pieces of wood expertly painted by super-talented Kentucky artist Tom Pfannerstill. From crushed Starbucks coffee cups to crumpled Goldfish cracker packages, he is able to create perfect replicas of all sorts of garbage he finds on the streets.

Tom calls the series ‘From the Street’; he starts off by choosing a real piece of trash and traces the outline of the object onto a flat piece of wood. Once his wooden canvas is ready, he fills it in with acrylic paints, in painstaking detail. The two-dimensional painting soon comes to life, looking exactly like a piece of trash it was modeled after.

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Drinking red blood-like drinks has been a growing trend in China for a few years now, but it really became a social phenomenon among teenagers after the launch of the fifth season of American TV drama, The Vampire Diaries.

Now you can find red “Blood type energy potions” pretty much everywhere. They can be ordered online, or enjoyed in the company of fellow would-be vampires at themed cafes. One such establishment recently opened in Liaoning, and quickly became a hit with youths fascinated by Dracula and other popular blood-suckers. The staff is dressed as doctors and nurses, drinks are only available in plastic blood bags inscribed with different blood types, coffins adorn the walls and vampire-themes music plays in the background.

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While picking up hitchhikers is generally considered unsafe, Canadian motorists are going to find it difficult to refuse this cute, fun-loving robot. His name is Hitchbot, and he’s about the size of a six-year-old child. Equipped with a GPS, 3G wireless connectivity, a camera, and a built-in child booster seat in its bum, he will soon try to catch rides all the way across Canada – from Nova Scotia to British Columbia.

Throughout the coast-to-coast journey that starts on July 27, Hitchbot will be completely by himself. He is expected to find rides by signalling with the only movable part of its tiny body – his arm. He can talk too; researchers are expecting him to be able to charm his way into getting the rides that he needs. Along the way, he will even share all his adventures via social media. “It’ll sort of be like having an out-of-control teenager in your car, taking pictures of you and posting them on Facebook,” said David Harris Smith, the brains behind the project.

“Simply put, I am a free-spirited robot who wants to explore Canada and meet new friends along the way,” Hitchbot declares on his website. According to Smith, “Hitchbot can ask people if they have a story they would like to share with others and this would be posted as video to Hitchbot.me. We will moderate posts to avoid inappropriate content.”

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Japan really does have some of the most interesting bars and restaurants that cater to a large variety of customers with strange interests. We’ve heard of restaurants catering to airsoft lovers, offering great discounts to bald patrons, using monkeys as waiters, and even a bar run by a monk. Now we’ve found out about a cross-dressing Tokyo bar that caters only to a female clientele. The waiters are women too, dressed as dashing young princes, while the customers get to be princesses for the day.

The aptly named ‘Bar Prince’ is located in Tokyo’s Nakano ward. They have a strict women-only policy for the staff as well as patrons. The boyish-looking staff don ruffle-trimmed prince outfits and swept-over hairstyles – they’re all crossdressers. Their mission is simple – to make every woman who walks through their doors feel like a princess. They even have a special name for their customers: ‘o-hime-sama’, which, obviously, means princesses.

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Dmitry Tihonenko, from Belarus, is a household-appliance repairman with a passion for everything steampunk. Although he primarily uses his workshop to fix broken appliances, he has this amazing hobby going on on the side – creating steampunk masterpieces out of mundane, everyday objects.

You have to to admit that even though modern appliances make our lives a lot easier, design-wise they are not always as cool-looking as we’d like . They’re most often mass-produced, plastic replicas of each other. But that’s where Dmitry comes in – he takes boring appliances and converts them into something truly wonderful, as you can see in the pictures.

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Cafe Olympic, a small restaurant in Nagasaki, Japan, is better known as ‘Parfait Heaven’. And for good reason – they serve a variety of jumbo-size parfaits that range in height from 1.5 ft. to a whopping 4 ft. tall.

The tallest parfait, the Nagasaki Dream Tower (120 cm), is filled with all kinds of wonderful things – ice cream, ice cream cones, chocolate cake, sherbet, soft serve ice cream, fruit, chiffon cake, coffee jello, whipped cream, corn flakes and even a slice of cheesecake. All these ingredients and more are stuffed into an extremely large parfait glass and topped off with Olympic Rings, to match the name of the restaurant and also mark the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The sinful dessert is served with a giant spoon to reach all the sugary goodness down to the bottom of the glass.

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For 14 years, company director Ellie James has been receiving the same Secret Santa presents at Christmas – bottles of perfume and bars of soap. And when she opens them, she is met with roaring laughter from her colleagues. The presents are mortifying, they break her heart every time because they are a subtle reminder of the horrible genetic disorder that she has to live with. Ellie suffers from a rare condition that leaves her reeking of fish and rotten eggs.

Ellie’s condition might seem amusing or even downright funny, but it’s quite sad when you look at it from her point of view. You might think that she isn’t very good at personal hygiene, but you would be wrong. At one point, she even showered five times a day and scrubbed her skin with dishwashing detergent until it became red and raw. But nothing worked; no matter how much Ellie cleaned herself, the smell kept coming back stronger.

It all began when Ellie turned 30. “At first I didn’t understand what was wrong,” said the 44-year-old from Abingdon, Oxfordshire. “I’d always had impeccable hygiene. The smell was a complete mystery – I wondered if my cat had brought in a mouse and left it to rot. But I slowly realized it was me when strangers began to stare at me while holding their noses. I heard people whispering about me in the office.”

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For many Christians, Lent is a time to abstain from the things they love. But for people like Chris Schryer, it’s just the opposite. He’s giving up everything else except what he loves most – beer. The 33-year-old web designer from Toronto has shunned all solid food  and has been living on beer since March 5. In fact, he believes that what he’s doing is a real test of spiritual discipline.

“Without being dramatic, it definitely is not fun,” said Chris. “It’s challenging. Every meal time there’s a challenge. I look pretty healthy now, but by the end of the 40 days my wife figures I’ll look like a castaway on account of my bushy beard.”

For the past few weeks, Chris has been having a bottle of strong beer for breakfast. At lunch, he guzzles another beer and dinner consists of a large 650 ml bottle. He also has a mid-afternoon ‘work beer’. To avoid getting dehydrated, he keeps up a steady intake of watered down juice and other clear liquids. His rules are simple: ‘No dairy, no ‘nectars’, no protein shakes or smoothies.” He takes a multivitamin and his health is constantly being monitored by his family doctor.

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‘Dreaming Camera’ is a quaint little coffee shop located in the breathtaking countryside of Yangpyeong County of South Korea. The spectacular café was built by a photography enthusiast, which is quite obvious, seeing as how the building is shaped like a gigantic vintage camera.

I’m not sure who the owners are, but here’s what I could gather from the website: it’s a mom-and-pop type café, run by a family of three. The husband is a former air-force helicopter pilot with a huge passion for photography. He lives in a beautiful bungalow just next to the café with his wife and adorable daughter. The camera-shaped coffee shop had been his dream for many years before he finally got the chance to make it a reality.

Café Dreaming Camera is designed like a Rolleiflex camera – it is two storeys high with panoramic, round windows. The first floor is decorated with miniature and toy cameras. A few real ones are displayed as well, on a shelf beside the large window. On the website, the owner’s wife writes that all the real cameras are her husband’s area of expertise; she just knows that ‘everything is working’. The second floor has a photo exhibition on display, in which patrons are encouraged to participate.

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