Jose Antonio Garcia has become known as ‘The Pilgrim’ in his native country of Spain, after spending the last 11 years of his life walking over 100,000 kilometers to various pilgrimage sites on all continents except Oceania. This year, his amazing journey has finally come to an end.

Born in Puerto de Santa María, in the Spanish province of Cadiz, Jose Antonio Garcia spent most of his life on water, working as a sailor. He wasn’t the most religious person, but after going through a near-death experience, he decided to dedicate his life to an epic pilgrimage to as many holy sites as he could walk to. In 1999, the fishing boat Jose was working on capsized off the coast of Norway, and he was the only survivor out of a crew of 17. He spent hours in the freezing water clinging to the bodies of two fellow sailors, and it was then that he turned to religion, vowing to the Virgen del Carmel, the patron of sailors, that he would walk to all of the world’s holy shrines, if she saved his life.

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For the last 20 years, Elizabeth Eaton Rosenthal, a.k.a. Elizabeth Sweetheart, a fine artist in Brooklyn, New York, has been dressing from head to toe in various shades of green. To her, green is the happiest, most positive color in the world, so she can’t imagine wearing anything else.

‘The Green Lady of Carroll Gardens’, as Elizabeth is most widely known, has always had a thing for experimenting. At one point in her life she wore only 1930s print dresses, before moving on to single colors, like silver, pink, purple, blue and finally green, which she surprisingly never got bored of. Her passion for green started with some home-mixed green nail polish and a neon lime streak in her hair, but it quickly spread to her clothing and her home, as well. Today, she always sports green hair, an attire made up of different hues of green, and most of the things she buys, from towels and skin care products to furniture and appliances, are also green.
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Jack Ma, founder of internet giant Alibaba Group, has one of the most recognized faces in China, but he’s not exactly famous for his good looks. Still, that hasn’t stopped on young entrepreneur from spending a small fortune on plastic surgery just so he could look more like the popular billionaire.

Huang Jian, a young man in Shenzhen, claims that he has so far spent around one million yuan ($145,000) on facial plastic surgery, in an effort to make himself look more like Jack Ma. The procedures were done in South Korea, Asia’s premier destination for extreme plastic surgery. Jian says that he is a big fan of China’s second richest man and is undergoing this extreme makeover in the hopes of one day meeting his idol.

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The Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, China, is one of the most popular suicide spots in the world, and also the place where one man has spent all his weekends and holidays over the last 13 years trying to convince people out of ending their lives. He has so far been able to save over 300 people.

Chen Si claims that he can approach and talk people out of jumping off the bridge, because he knows how they feel. Many of those who attempt to commit suicide on the Yangtze River Bridge are not actually from Nanjing, but migrant workers living far away from home. Mr. Chen was like them once, a migrant disappointed with his life, living far away from his family. But then he met an old man who offered him optimistic advice and helped him look at life in a positive way. Unfortunately, not longer after they met, the old man’s sons started arguing about their inheritance, and he got so upset that he stopped eating and eventually died. It was this tragic event that inspired Chen to help troubled souls overcome their difficulties and persuade them that life is worth living. He always believed that if he had visited the old man sooner, as he had planned to do, he might have convinced him of that as well. “What could be more important than life itself?” he asks.

So every weekend since 2003, Chen Si has been traveling 25 kilometers from his home to the Yangtze Bridge and patrolling it for hours, either on foot or on his scooter, looking for people who look like they might be thinking of jumping into the river. He pays particularly close attentions to loners staring into the muddy waters below. Chen says he has become an expert at spotting people contemplating suicide. “It is very easy to recognize,” he says. “A person walks without a soul.”

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Most people barely manage to pull one car using both their arms, but an Indian teenager can pull two of them using only his unusually strong shoulder blades.

18-year-old Abhishek Choubey, from India’s Madhya Pradesh state, started using his shoulder blades to pull various objects when he was just 8, after noticing that they were of a different shape than those of his friends. At first, he used hooks from the local market, but they didn’t fit very well between his shoulder blades, so, after noticing his unusual talent, his father, Avdesh, designed a special wooden hook for him, as a gift. With it he managed to practice with increasingly heavy objects, until he finally managed to pull a car weighing 2314 lbs for 27.5 meters. Inspired by his success, he decided to challenge himself even more, by pulling two cars, and he succeeded.

“I realised there are many people who can pull heavy vehicles with ears and even hair, but I am the only one who can pull two cars at a time with my shoulder blades,’ Abhishek said. His new goal is to have his achievement acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Records.

 

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At first glance, Bella Devyatkina, from Moscow, Russia, is your typical carefree, playful four-year-old, but ask her a question in Russian, English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese or Arabic, and you will be shocked by her articulate response.

Bella made headlines in Russia a few days ago, when she appeared on a TV talent show, where she spoke seven different languages without a prominent accent, stunning both the judges and millions of viewers. Since then, a YouTube video of her performance went viral online, transforming the four-year-old polyglot into on overnight internet celebrity. She has since been invited to appear on a variety of television programs where moderators and other guests conversed with her in several of the seven languages she is fluent in, and she always understood their questions and answered accordingly.

So how does a four-year-old girl learn so many languages in such a short period of time, when most people spend years struggling to become fluent in just one foreign language. Bella’s mother, Yulia, said that she and her father started teaching her English when she was just two years old, and after noticing her interest in the language and the ease with which she picked up everything, they decided to gradually adding more languages to her schedule. They hired native tutors for each new language, and by the time she was three and a half years old, she was already speaking two languages. She mastered two more, in the next six months.

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Kiyoto Saito, a young rice farmer from Kengo, Japan’s Yamagata prefecture, is trying to change people’s perception of agricultural work through his unusual attire. Whether he’s driving a tractor, or is standing up to his knees in the marshy rice fields, Kiyoto is always wearing an elegant suit complete with shirt and tie.

Kiyoto’s family has been cultivating rice in the fields around Kengo for around 400 years, but as a teenager he found the tradition boring, and moved to the city. He returned to his native town a few years ago determined to start a family and get involved in the family business, but decided to put his unique twist on it.

The idea of wearing a suit in the fields started as a joke. One day, at the dinner table, his brother joked about farming in an elegant suit, but Kyioto took it seriously. He viewed the idea as the perfect way to change public perception of agricultural work in Japan. “Most people think of farmers as ‘dirty all day’ and not making much money,” he told Zoomin TV. “I want youngsters to think ‘ farming looks fun’.

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Shenki Maslani, a 30-year-old Albanian car salesman living in northern Macedonia, has taken on the unofficial name “Shenki Versace” to show off his obsession with the Italian fashion label. Virtually everything he owns has either the Versace name or the company’s iconic Medusa logo on it.

Shenki recently told Macedonian media that he first fell in love with Versace in 2009, and he has spent the last seven years surrounding himself with Versace branded items, from clothing and jewelry to his several luxury cars and even his house. The young car salesman claims that thanks to his lucrative business, he has been able to spend around €1 million ($1.1 million) on his obsession, and has no regrets.

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For the past five years, Akihiko Koseki, has been putting on his bright yellow spandex suit and trademark poo-shaped hat, and going out on the streets of Tokyo to put a smile on people’s faces and teach them to be happier by not giving a crap.

In the beginning, Poop Man was merely a cheap marketing tool. Akihiko Koseki is an experienced mobile game developer who a few years ago came up with an idea for a game called Poo Pride. He had no money to promote it and decided that turning himself into a walking billboard for his game was the cheapest and at the same time most effective way of raising awareness about his game. So he had a yellow spandex suit and poop-shaped hat made, plastered the Poo Pride logo on his chest and started walking around as Poop Man. He’s been doing it for the last five years.

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Lee Su Jin, a female dentist from South Korea, is a very strong contender for the title of world’s youngest-looking 48-year-old. Judging by the photos posted on her online social media accounts, you’d think she was a beautiful college girl, but the woman recently revealed that she was born in 1969 and has been practicing dentistry for 16 years.

Lee became an overnight celebrity after appearing on a Korean TV show called ‘Same Bed, Different Dreams’, alongside her daughter. The girls claimed that her mother had become addicted to taking selfies and posting them on Instagram, where she had amassed thousands of loyal followers. It was later revealed that the 48-year-old dentist had turned to the popular social network in her need for social interaction, because her daughter had stopped talking to her after starting middle school. She enjoyed all the attention she got from other people online, and kept posting more and more photos of herself.

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For the past five years, 44-year-old Finish-Syrian Rami Adham has dedicated his life to helping the children of Aleppo cope with the horrors of war by smuggling toys into the besieged city.

Rami Adhman was born in Aleppo, but moved to Finland with his family in 1989. When the Syrian civil war started, in 2012, he decided he had to help the children of his native city in any way he could. In the beginning, he never planned on taking toys, thinking that food, medicine, and drinking water were the things that mattered most. However, on one occasion of crossing the border, his daughter told him she wanted to donate her toys to the kids of Aleppo. He took the girl up on her offer, and upon seeing the joy on the Syrian children’s faces when he took the toys out of his backpack, he decided to make them a priority on his subsequent runs.

Adham soon became known as the “toy smuggler” and the “Santa of Syria”. He has so far made the journey from Helsinki to Aleppo 28 times, and doesn’t plan on stopping until the war ends. Until two years ago, he crossed into Syria through the border with Turkey, but after it closed down, he started crossing into the war-torn country illegally, carrying an 80kg bag of toys on his back all the way to Aleppo. It’s a dangerous trip that he has to make by foot, because it’s dangerous to drive through rebel-held and government-held districts. But those aren’t the only forces he has to avoid, as he claims that his humanitarian efforts have also made him a wanted man by ISIS and Shia militias in Syria.

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Khoudia Diop is a young Senegalese fashion model who recently rose to internet stardom after her unusually dark skin tone was captured in a photo for the Colored campaign, a platform that celebrates different skin shades.

Khoudia’s melanin-rich skin has taken the internet by storm, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, especially on Instagram, where she regularly posts photos of herself using the handle @melaniin.goddess. People seem crazy about her stunning  natural beauty and unique skin tone, showering her with compliments about her look and declaring themselves impressed by her positive attitude and confidence.

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He has won the World Memory Championship eight times in a period of ten years, can memorize a full deck of cards in a few seconds and is banned from casinos all across the world. He is Dominic O’Brien, the man with the world’s best memory.

Looking back at his childhood, 59-year-old Dominic O’Brien admits that he is probably the world’s most unlikely mnemonist. That’s because as a young boy, he had “severe attention problems” and “never listened to anything the teacher said.” Although the term ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ (ADD) had not yet been coined in the 1960s, it is speculated that some sort of attention disorder may have been a likely diagnosis for Dominic during his childhood. He also used to write backwards and suffered from dyslexia.

“I had a knock to my head as a baby. I collided with a train and was actually dragged off onto the railway line,” O’Brien recalls. “There was severe bruising to the top of my forehead so they think there may have been some damage there.”

The eight-time World Memory Champion believes that if he has been able to become an accomplished mnemonist, despite his childhood problems, anyone can do it. All it takes is creative thinking.

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62-year-old Zhang Jianxing has been scouring the ancient forests of the Shennongjia National Nature Reserve for over two decades, in search of the mythical Yeren, or Chinese yeti, and says he will not give up until he comes face to face with the creature.

Zhang began living as a hermit in the 3,200-square-kilometer mountain range in 1994, after becoming fascinated with the Yeren, a 6-foot-tall humanoid creature covered in thick red-brown fur. References of the so-called Chinese Wild Man date back to the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BC) in the works of classical poet and statesman Qu Yuan, mentions of its existence in the pristine forests of Shennongjia, China’s Hubei province, have been popping up throughout history ever since.

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A Filipino teen who once paid just 500 pesos ($10.74) for cosmetic procedures on his nose and chin has been regretting his decision ever since, as the intervention left him disfigured.

Ever since he was 16 years old, Ellowe Alviso had been using his good looks as a source of income, by landing various modelling jobs. About three years ago, he decided to increase his chances of being selected for modelling gigs by enhancing his facial features. However, he also wanted to save some money, so instead of going to a certified plastic surgery clinic, he got in touch with Kasheca Magallanes, a transgender nurse who was allegedly well-versed in cosmetic procedures. She agreed to work on his face for just 500 Philippine Pesos, which was apparently too good an offer to pass up. Unfortunately, Ellowe would live to regret his decision. Read More »