The Qiyi City Forest Garden residential complex in Chengdu, China, was supposed to be a green paradise for its residents, but two years on, the vertical forest concept has turned into a nightmare.

Back in 2018, the idea of living among dozens of exotic plants proved very exciting for the people of Chengdu, one of China’s most polluted cities, and by April of 2020 all 826 units in the Qiyi City Forest Garden complex had been sold. Each unit had up to 20 types of plants growing on the balcony, and filtering the city’s air and noise pollution. However, instead of an urban paradise, the eight-tower complex looks like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic film, with balconies overrun by sprawling greenery and plagues of mosquitoes.

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Hongeo is a bizarre South Korean dish with a pungent aroma that most people describe as a mix of dirty public toilet and wet laundry left untended for days.

Made from skate, a bottom-dwelling ray fish, Hongeo is considered by far South Korea’s smelliest food. It’s so stinky that many South Koreans wouldn’t come near it, let alone put in their mouths. However, its many fans can’t get enough of the ammonia fumes it emanates and swear that once you get used to it, it’s impossible to replace with anything else. But feasting on this stinky delicacy comes with a social cost, as the smell tends to linger in the mouth as well as on clothes. In fact, hongeo-specialized restaurants advise customers to seal their jackets in plastic bags before eating, and spray them with deodorant before leaving.

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Chinese social media has been abuzz about the controversial story of a couple who took their own daughter to court in order to make her raise her toddler brother, because they couldn’t afford to.

According to several news reports in China, a couple who for several years had survived on their child’s monthly allowance alone decided to have a second child. They soon realized that they couldn’t actually afford to take care of the child, so they asked their 22-year-old daughter to raise the toddler on their behalf. The girl, referred to only as Le Le in the media, had managed to support herself through college and was dreaming about building a career for herself when she got the news of her new “job” from her parents. She flat out refused to bring up her brother by herself, so her parents sued her.

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A 15-year-old Chinese girl and her youthful-looking father have been getting a lot of attention on Asian social media recently because they look more like a romantic couple than father and daughter.

Qi Bao and her 35-year-old father have always been very close, but their relationship has become a bit more complicated recently, because as she grew up, her father seemed to retain his ageless look to the point where her colleagues and teachers started asking her if she had started dating. 35-years-old is not exactly old, but there is still a 20 year difference between the two, although you honestly could not tell from the photos below.

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After struggling to stay open during the Covid-19 pandemic, a sushi restaurant in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, has found success with an ingenious “macho delivery” service that involves using buff bodybuilders as delivery boys.

Masanori Sugiura, a third-generation owner of the 60-year-old sushi restaurant Imazushi in the city of Anjo, started working out at the gym when he was in his 20s, but he never imagined that his hobby would one day help him keep his family business afloat. The trained chef had seen his profits plummet from the usual 100 million yen ($940,000) for the April-June quarter, to just 10 million yen, because of the coronavirus, and at one point had cut his staff from 50 to just four. But then he had a wacky idea to put his muscles to work as a way of attracting new business, and the “Delivery Macho” service was born.

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Police in the Japanese province of Okinawa have been struggling with a phenomenon called rojo-ne, which translates literally as “sleeping on the road”.

Imagine driving home late at night and seeing someone laying in the middle of the road. Or worse yet, not seeing that someone in time to actually slam the brakes. Such nightmare scenarios occur quite frequently in Okinawa, with provincial police reporting over 7,000 cases recorded in 2019 alone. Some of those unfortunately resulted in the loss of human lives, and authorities are desperate to put an end to rojo-ne, a phenomenon that has been on the rise in Okinawa for years. Sadly, despite taking several measures against offenders, police have seen no improvements. In fact, things have been getting worse.

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In a country that eschews confrontation and frowns upon public display of passion, bold entrepreneurs eager to take up the burden of ending a romantic relationship on a client’s behalf can make a fortune.

The Wakaresaseya, literally “breaker-uppers”, are professional agents that specialize in destroying relationships, be they marriages or affairs, for a fee. After taking on a contract these unlicensed operatives stop at nothing to achieve their goal, which includes extreme measures like entrapment, financial burdening and lying. Wakaresaseya are viewed by some in Japanese society as immoral, but they have been around for decades and their services are more popular than ever.

Wakaresaseya services, many of which are tied to private detective agencies, are often advertised online and cater to both married people seeking a reason to leave their spouse, and married individuals who know about their partner’s infidelity and want to end it without getting involved. Prices reportedly vary from a couple of hundred dollars for simple cases, to upwards of $150,000 for high-profile cases where discretion if of the upmost importance.

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On the fourth Saturday of each January, the dead grass of Mount Wakakusa is set ablaze as part of a unique and impressive festival called Wakakusa Yamayaki (‘Wakakusa Burning Mountain’).

No one known exactly how the tradition of burning an entire 342-metre-high hill in Japan’s Nara Prefecture actually started, but one thing is for certain – it has been around for hundreds of years. Some say it began as a boundary dispute between the two greatest temples of Nara, Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji, sometime during the 18th century. When mediation failed, the entire hill was burned to the ground, although no one quite remembers how that solved anything. Another theory claims that the annual fire originated as a way to eliminate pests and drive away wild boars. Today, it’s just an impressive sight to behold that attracts tourists from all over the world.

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With tourism at an all-time low, a struggling Japanese railway operator is trying to avoid going under by selling canned stones from its railway tracks.

Founded in 1923, the Choshi Electric Railway company, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, had to overcome adversity several times during its 97-year history, but the situation has never been more dire than it is now. The railway operator relies on tourism to support its operations, but with the novel Coronavirus wreaking havoc all over the world, business has never been worse, so management had to come up with alternative ways of generating income. Among these, starting a YouTube channel and selling canned stones have been proving unusually successful.

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A newly opened highway in China’s Guangdong province has been making news headlines for a very peculiar reason: it’s built around the tiny home who refused to move.

China is well-known for its “nail houses”, properties of homeowners who reject compensation from a developer for their demolition, but while most such examples are encountered within new residential complexes, the one we’re featuring today stands in the middle of a highway bridge. Footage released by Chinese media shows the property tightly squeezed between the lanes of the newly opened Haizhuyong Bridge, in the city of Guangzhou. It is located in a pit in the middle of the four-lane road bridge and has become somewhat of a local attraction.

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Su ‘Moh Moh’ Naing, a 23-year-old girl from Myanmar shot to online fame earlier this week after being featured by a popular English tabloid for having an incredibly thin waist.

The Burmese student claims to have a waist circumference of only 13.7 inches, which would make it one of the tiniest waists in the world, but even more shocking is the fact that Naing insist her waist size is only linked to genetics. Despite being accused of digitally editing the photos she posts on her Instagram, and even of having some of her ribs removed or constantly wearing a tight corset to achieve such a tiny figure, Su Naing says she is all natural.

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The Gate Tower Building is one of the many several tall office buildings that make up Osaka’s impressive skyline, but there is something about it that makes it unique in the world – it has a functional highway going right through it.

Photos of this architectural anomaly have been doing the rounds on social media for over two decades now, and it’s easy to see why. 16-storey buildings don’t usually have highway off-ramps going right through them, but the Gate Tower Building does, and the traffic doesn’t affect the people working inside it one bit. The elevators are located on the side of the building, and the highway itself doesn’t touch the tower, which is properly insulated against traffic noise and vibrations anyway. It’s still quite a sight to behold, and if you’re ever in Osaka you should definitely pass by, or rather, through.

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Nguyen Thi Dinh, an 83-year-old woman from Vietnam’s Ben Tre Province, allegedly stopped cutting her hair when she was 19, which explains why it measures 6 meters in length and is shaped like a python.

Just a week after Indian man Doddapalliah made international news headlines with his 7.3-meter-long-hair, which he claimed he had never even trimmed, we feature the story of a Vietnamese pensioner who insists that she hasn’t cut or even shampooed her locks in the last 64 years. It all started when Nguyen Thi Dinh, from Binh Thanh Commune, in Giong Trom District, was 19 years old and cut her hair for the first time. She claims to have experienced such severe headaches that her parents took her to see a doctor, but even after taking the prescribed treatment, the symptoms persisted. The headaches only went away when her hair started growing longer again, so she has refrained from cutting her locks ever since.

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Wat Pariwat, in Bangkok, Thailand, gets its famous nickname – “David Beckham Temple” – from a gold-plated statue of the English former football player holding up a statue of Buddha. But that’s just one of the unexpected characters you’re bound to notice visiting this unusual holy place.

David Beckham’s statue was installed at Pariwat Temple in 1999, when the sculptor, who happened to be a die-hard Manchester United fan, was allowed to include it as a permanent temple decoration as a symbol of his love for the club. It has since become famous all over the world and has even given the temple its nickname. But this statue isn’t all that’s unusual about this Buddhist temple, not even close. Among Buddhist-themed artworks and representations of mythical creatures, you’ll notice some characters that don’t quite belong, like Batman or Albert Einstein…

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A homesick camel recently managed to melt the hearts of millions of Chinese people after it was reported that it traveled 100 kilometres through the desert to return to its former owners, eight months after being sold.

Chinese media recently featured the heartwarming story of a loyal camel who allegedly spent days crossing the barren desert of North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to reach its former home after being sold to another farmer eight months prior. The injured animal was spotted walking through the desert earlier this month by another herdsman who took it in and tended to its needs while trying to find its owner. News of the camel’s discovery reached its owner who rushed to retrieve it, but after hearing about the animal’s arduous journey, its former masters wanted it back.

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