Indonesian media has been abuzz with the unlikely love story of Ilaria, a young waitress from Italy, and Dzufilkar, a young man from a small village in Central Java. The two reportedly met on Facebook two years ago, and Ilaria has been saving money ever since to be able to meet and marry her soulmate. Her dream recently became a reality.

Internet romances are not exactly uncommon in this day and age, but they rarely involve leaving your old comfortable life behind to fly halfway across the world to a small Indonesian village just to be with the person you love, especially since you’ve never actually met them in person before. But that’s exactly what Ilaria did, after saving up her waitress salary for a couple of years.

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For the past couple of days, fashion retailer Nordstrom has been the butt of a lot of jokes on social media, after it was revealed that it is selling a pair of jeans caked in fake mud for a whopping $425.

The Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans are apparently brand new, but make you look like you’ve just finished feeding your pigs, or you just fell in a ditch after a wild night of partying. They look filthy, but that’s apparently the point, as Nordstrom claims the mud “shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.”

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Most of us have trouble painting something decent on the largest of canvases, but true artists can unleash their talent on pretty much anything, even leaves. Case in point, Indian artist Sandesh S. Rangnekar, who paints detailed works of art on fragile skeleton peepal leaves.

Rangnekar learned the ancient art of peepal leaf painting from his father, acclaimed artist Sadashiv G. Rangnekar. Fascinated by his father’s skills, Sandesh started sneaking into his art studio when he was 10-years-old and slowly but steadily mastered the traditional art form. He always made sure to leave the studio before his father came home, so he had no clue of his son’s artistic talent, and the first time Sandesh shared one of his early works with him, he was impressed. So much so that he encouraged the boy to use his paints and brushes from then on, which Sandesh says gave him a huge confidence boost.

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A Dutch physical therapist turned inventor has spent 15 years developing a tailor-made pillow that he claims will solve any sleeping problems. At a price of $57,000, it better!

Created by Thijs van der Hilst, who is supposedly some sort of neck specialist, the world’s most expensive pillow is made of Mulberry silk, Egyptian cotton, non-toxic Dutch memory foam and 24-carat gold fabric, while its zipper is  studded  with  four  diamonds and a huge 22.5-carat sapphire. It sounds pretty expensive already, but it takes more than high-quality materials and jewelry to justify such an outrageous price tag for a pillow.

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Most people get chills down their spine at the simple thought of a tarantula, but one Indonesian woman literally can’t get enough of them. 28-year old Ming Cu has been collecting tarantulas since 2010, and she now has 1,500 of them living in her home.

Ming Cu’s obsession with tarantulas began 7 years ago, when she spotted a beautifully-colored tarantula in her yard, in Bandung City, Indonesia. She only took some photos of it, but the more she looked at the pictures, the more fascinated she became with the eight-legged creatures, and it wasn’t long before she started looking online for people selling tarantulas. She bought one, than another, and before she knew it, Ming was hooked. Over the past seven years she has spent over $55,000 on tarantulas, and now has 1,500 of them living in a special room in her home.

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With cattle breeding at an all time high, manure has become one of the world’s greatest environmental hazards, but one Dutch artist is using chemistry to turn into something that is both eco-friendly and valuable. Her innovative technique turns manure into a variety of useful materials like clothing fabric, bio-degradable plastic and paper.

In recent years, scientists around the world have made great progress in their attempts to recycle cattle manure, including turning it into natural fertilizer and biogas, but Eindhoven designer Jalila Essaïdi didn’t think they were efficient enough to solve the global manure surplus problem. So she started on her very own solution, one that approached animal waste as a valuable material that could be processed into useful products. The results of her work prove that manure really is worth its weight in gold.

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The story of Sindhutai Sapkal is one of incredible determination in the face of adversity, rebirth and love of children who nobody else wanted. The 68-year-old has raised over 1,400 orphans, offering them not just food and shelter, but also the love of a real family. Her amazing work has earned her over 750 awards, and the nickname “Mother of Orphans”.

Sapkal runs four orphanages in her home town of Prune, India’s Maharashtra state – two for girls and two for boys – with the help of her biological daughter, Mamta, and her eldest adopted children, some of whom have become lawyers, doctors and professors. The children under her care were found trying to fend for themselves in railway station, abandoned in dustbins, or even dragged by stray dogs in the streets. New ones are brought to her orphanages all the time, and as long as they are eligible for adoption, she never turns them away. But unlike state-run orphanages, the Mother of Orphans doesn’t give her children up for adoption with other families, and doesn’t turn them away when they turn 18.

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The snapdragon or dragon flower is one of the most popular plants in gardens around Europe, United States, and North Africa. Named for its resemblance to a dragon’s mouth that opens and closes when lightly squeezed, this beautiful flower also has a dark side. When its petals wither away and fall off, they leave behind dried seedpods that look a lot like creepy tiny skulls.

One of the few plants to resemble something when alive and another thing entirely when dead, the snapdragon flower has inspired various legends ever since ancient times. According to one story, women who eat the tiny skull-like seedpods will regain their lost youth and beauty, while another says that scattering them throughout the house will protect residents from curses, sorcery and other evil things.

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82-year-old Sumiko Iwamuro runs a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo, where she spends her days making “gyoza” dumplings, but when the sun sets, she turns into DJ Sumirock, an energetic party-starter dropping beats in popular nightclubs around the Japanese capital.

Sumiko discovered her passion for techno music 12 years ago, while choosing the music at her son’s birthday party, and apparently found it fascinating enough to dedicate a whole year of her life to learning the tricks of DJ-ing at a school for disc jockeys. She then started making her own tracks, most of which consist of techno beats mixed with jazz, French chanson and classical music. These combination proved a hit with Japanese nightclub-goers and 82-year-old DJ Sumirock is one of the most popular disc jockeys in Tokyo.

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Imagine a sport much like equestrian show jumping, but where the horse is replaced by a wooden stick with a plush toy at one and the rider actually does all the jumping over increasingly difficult hurdles. That’s the popular sport of Competitive Hobbyhorsing in a nutshell.

The hobby horse is one of the oldest children’s toys still used today. Many of us remember prancing around in the yard on a stick imagining that it was a noble steed, but for the tens of thousands of members of the hobbyhorsing community in Finland, riding a toy horse is more than just a game. Many of them train for hours and hours on a daily basis and regularly take part in large-scale show jumping competitions where they try to impress judges with their posture, footwork and jumping.

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A 20-year-old man from Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region recently made national headlines after being declared the winner of a women’s lingerie photo contest organized by a popular store chain.

Andrey Nagorny, a resident of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, heard of the online photo contest through his girlfriend. Aware of his feminine features, they decided to take a few photos of Andrey wearing some sexy women’s lingerie and enter them into the contest, just for fun. Andrey’s girlfriend, whose name has not been made public, fixed his hair and did his makeup before asking a talented photographer to snap some rather professional-looking photos of him and submitting them to the contest organizer online. They expected to get a good laugh out of the whole thing, but what they didn’t expect was for Andrey to be declared the winner.

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Heavy metal music and yoga may seem incompatible, but one New York yoga instructor with a passion for metal has mixed them together in a series of classes that help people relax and unleash their inner beast at the same time.

Headbanging, death growls or “devil horns” hand gestures, all executed to a background of loud metal music, aren’t exactly elements associated with yoga, but it’s exactly what you can expect while attending a Metal Yoga Bones class run by Saskia Thode. It’s not the most Zen experience in the world, that’s for sure, but the Brooklyn-based yoga instructor claims that her classes are just as liberating, if not more so, than regular yoga.

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Authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan have recently equipped busy intersections with automatic pedestrian gates that only open when the traffic light turns green. The measure is aimed at preventing jaywalking, which has become a serious problem in many urban centers across China.

Chinese officials have been cracking down on jaywalkers for years. Jaywalking in the Asian country, often referred to as “Chinese-style street crossing”, often involves pedestrians completely ignoring traffic signals and crossing busy streets and roads, usually in large groups. This contributes heavily to traffic jams and bottlenecks in busy Chinese cities, and fines haven’t proven as effective a deterrent as authorities had hoped.

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Ever since he decorated his prized Jaguar S-Type with 4,600 colorful toy cars from his Hot Wheels collection, a Malaysian businessman has been turning heads in and around Kuala Lumpur.

Reports of an unusual-looking Jaguar S-Type limousine covered in thousands of miniature cars driving around the Malaysian capital had been circulating on social media for a few weeks, but no one knew anything about it, who the owner was or if it was just some sort of marketing stunt. Luckily, the Harian Metro managed to track down the owner and get to the bottom of this mystery.

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Driven by a desire to improve the living conditions in his home, Huang Dafa, chief of Caowangba, a small village hidden deep in the mountains of Guizhou Province, China, spent 36 years digging a 10-kilometer-long water canal through three mountains.

The Chinese legend of Yu Gong speaks of an old man whose house was separated from the nearest village by two mountains. So he started digging away at them to make a direct route to the village. People mocked him for what they called a futile effort,  but he responded that while his descendants could dig for generations, the mountains couldn’t grow any higher. Moved by his determination, the gods moved the mountains, clearing the way for Yu Gong. Today, the saying “yu gong yi shan” – “the old man that could move mountains” – is used to describe ambition in the face on insurmountable odds.

But while the mythical Yu Gong was helped by divine intervention, Huang Dafa, village chief of Caowangba, in the mountains of Guizhou, could only rely on his will and the power of persuasion to build a long water channel through three karst mountains. His ambitious project began in 1959 and required 36 years of hard labor to complete. Today, his village is thriving thanks to constant running water, and he is celebrated as a real-life version of Yu Gong.

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