If you choose a hot tourist spot for your holiday, you are likely to be drowned by a great number of tourists, noise and long lines. At this point you might wonder why you ever left home. Here are some tips to deal with crowds and avoid the trouble that might ruin your trip.

Book Tickets In Advance 

    Buy tickets online before you leave home, and skip the crowds and endless lines at your destination(目的地). Smart travelers can avoid the queue when visiting abroad with online ticket sales.

Talk To People

    You can ask the travel agency and the hotel for help. Ask questions, get maps, ask about taxis, restaurants and the sites you wish to visit. These people are experts and can save you lots of time trying to find things out for yourself.

Sign Up For Special Tours

    If there are any special events or tours being offered for your vacation, buy them in advance. Firstly they are usually cheaper bought in advance and secondly it makes sure you get booked in before they are sold out.

Visit During the Weekdays

    We all know that most sites and events are less crowded during the week than on weekends when people are off work and the kids are out of school. Flights are also usually cheaper on weekdays than they are on weekends.

Watch The Weather

    Mother nature controls a lot of what we do especially for outdoor activities. Check the weather forecasts and plan your indoor and outdoor activities according to the weather ahead of time.

    It puzzled Emily when she was aware of something wrong. She tripped upon men's clothing "hidden" around her house.

    The 38-year-old woman says, at the beginning, she was confused to see quite a few photographs in her phone that she did not remember taking. She was the subject but something was different. Her friends started falling away and she did not know why. Her long-term relationship with her boyfriend also ended suddenly.

    Now she knows those men's clothing belonged to one of her "alternatives" and the same person was responsible for her closest friends' leaving her.

    In an interview, Emily said she was not allowed to name "the man" who takes over her body. She was not allowed to name any of her six alternative persons. She said, "I am aware that they are not real people, not physical people. They exist in an imaginative world. However, all those alternatives should be treated with dignity and respect."

    Emily has what's called Dissociative Identity Disorder（DID分离性身份识别障碍）, a condition characterized by the presence of two or more split personalities that have power over a person's behaviour.

    Her condition resulted from a car accident five years ago. It was August, 2012, when her vehicle broke down on the side of the road. A speeding driver crashed into her car. She wasn't physically injured but she suffered a mental condition caused by severe brain injury. Shortly after that, she discovered she wasn't alone inside her head. Switching between personalities happens frequently but there is no real pattern. It can be weeks between incidents then, for whatever reason, it happens more regularly.

    One of her alternatives is a smoker, even though she is not. Upon waking, she says there are messages in her head that she is a smoker. She describes her lifestyle as "isolated".

    "People consider DID as tragedy" she says, "I just want to make an effort to tell others that we deserve respect, that we are legally accepted members of society, and we hope to live a normal life. I'm not stupid, I'm not spiting or running around people with knives. I have a mental problem but try to live a normal life. I completed a course at Harvard, I wrote a book, I'm able to communicate well. I mother my two kids well. I'm not on welfare."

    Actually, she volunteers for an organization helping children. She also spends time speaking out about her condition and has written a book on the subject, hoping to help others who are experiencing the same trouble.

    About three decades ago, China was known as the "Bicycle Kingdom". But later on, bikes were replaced by their fuel-powered competitors.

    But recent months have seen a recovery of the humble bike across China, with an increasing number of people choosing cycling instead of driving to schools, to workplaces or to do sightseeing. The introduction of bike-sharing schemes, pioneered by start-ups like Ofo and Mobike, has brought the trend to a new level.

    People can unlock the shared bikes by simply using their smartphone. The bikes are equipped with GPS and can be left anywhere in public for the next user. They're popular among many Chinese people as they provide an effective solution to the "last mile" problem, which refers to the final leg of a person's journey.

    " In places where the subway doesn't extend, where it's difficult to change from one kind of transport to another, it's so easy to get where you want to go with Mobike," Hu Hong,29,told AFP. She pedals(骑车)to her Shanghai real-estate job.

    However, the schemes have also led to problems such as illegal parking, vandalism(故意毁坏) and theft. Last month, two nurses in Beijing were placed under administrative punishment for five days for putting locks on two shared bikes. And in December, a man who stole a shared bike was sentenced to a 3-month detention(拘留),and fined 1 ,000 yuan by the Shanghai Minhang People's Court.

    " Bike-sharing is a greener method of transportation and provides a user-friendly experience,"said Liu Xiaoming, vice-minister of transport.

    " But it's a combination of online and offline business. Operators are usually strong in online services, but lack offline business experience, which causes problems."

    Now, Chinese service operators are trying to solve the problems. For example, a bike- sharing company called Mobike sets a 100-point credit score for each user, with points taken in the case of bad behavior. Once a score drops below 80, bike rental is increased to 100 yuan per 30 minutes, up from 0.5 - 1 yuan.

    It started during a yoga class. She felt a strange pull on her neck, a feeling completely foreign to her. Her friend suggested she rush to the emergency room. It turned out that she was having a heart attack.

    She didn't share similar symptoms with someone who was likely to have a heart attack. She exercised, watched her plate and did not smoke. But on reviewing her medical history, I found that her cholesterol (胆固醇) level was sky-high. She had been prescribed a cholesterol-lowering statin (他汀) medication, but she never picked up the prescription because of the scary things she had read about statins on the Internet. She was the victim of fake medical news.

    While misinformation has been the object of great attention in politics, medical misinformation might lead to an increase in deaths. As is true with fake news in general, medical lies tend to spread further than truths on the Internet—and they have very real bad consequences.

    False medical information can also lead to patients experiencing greater side effects through the "nocebo effect (反安慰剂效应) ". Sometimes patients benefit from an intervention (干预) simply because they believe they will—that's the placebo effect (安慰剂效应). The nocebo effect is the opposite. Patients can experience harmful effects because they anticipate them. This is very true of statins. In blinded trials, patients who get statins are no more likely to report feeling muscle aches than patients who get a placebo. Yet, in clinical practice, according to one study, almost a fifth of patients taking statins report side effects, leading many to discontinue the drugs.

    What else is on the fake news hit list? As always, vaccines (疫苗) . False concerns that the vaccine may cause side effects have greatly reduced coverage rates.

    Cancer is another big target for pushers of medical misinformation—many of whom refuse alternative therapies. "Though most people think cancer tumors are bad, they're actually the way your body attempts to contain the harmful cells," one fake news story reads. It warns that prescription medications lead to the uncontrolled cell mutations (变异) .

    Silicon Valley needs to face this problem. I am not a free-speech lawyer, but when human health is at risk, perhaps search engines, social media platforms and websites should be held responsible for promoting or hosting fake information. Meanwhile, journalists should do a better job of spreading accurate information.

    Recently, a 1935 letter in which Ernest Hemingway detailed his catch of a 500lb blue marlin(青枪鱼), an adventure that is believed to have partly inspired his novel The Old Man and the Sea, has been sold for﹩28, 000 (£22, 000).

    The handwritten letter was sent by Hemingway on 8 May to the fishing editor of the Miami Herald, laying out in great detail how the author and his friend Henry Strater battled to keep sharks away from the marlin after catching it off the Bahamian island of Bimini.

    Nate D Sanders, the auction(拍卖) company which sold the letter, said it documented for the first time in Hemingway's own words not only the size of the marlin, but also the attack by sharks, reflecting the plot of the novel.

    The company added that Hemingway's account of the marlin catch differed from other anecdotes of it, one of which described Hemingway using a machine gun on the sharks, which is said to have attracted more sharks rather than frightened them away.

    The Old Man and the Sea was also inspired by an anecdote told by Hemingway's Cuban friend Carlos Gutierrez. In 1936, Hemingway wrote in a magazine that Carlos had told him about an old fisherman who caught a great marlin alone.

    Three years later, Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that he was planning a short story about the old commercial fisherman who fought the swordfish all alone in his sailing boat. Instead, he ended up writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, not returning to the story about the old fisherman until January 1951. It won him the Pulitzer in 1953, and was specifically cited when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954.

On Nov 11, an Australian jockey (骑师) got hurt after his horse "broke down" during a horse race in Hong Kong. Though the jockey is safe now, his horse was not so lucky. Since the horse's leg injury would have led to its death, vets euthanized (实施安乐死) it in front of the audience on the spot. Falling off a horse at high speed has a big risk of injury. You can say it's the jockey's choice to take part in the sport. But what about the horses?

This is not the first time that animals have been harmed because of animal entertainment-related sports. For example, about 180,000 bulls (公牛) are killed in bullfights around the world, with many more injured in bullfight events every year, according to Human Society International, an organization promoting the human-animal relationship globally. Hunters shoot more than 800 lions in South Africa, reported World Animal Protection.

To help these animals, animal lovers have started many campaigns , which seem to be taking effect. In June, Churchill Downs, the site of the famous Kentucky Derby in the US, stopped all horse racing, originally set to run until July 

3. Circuses using animals have been banned by many countries around the world in recent years due to animal welfare worries, according to the website Four Paws.

Animals play an important part in our lives and are more than tools for sports and entertainment. The human-animal bond can be seen in all kinds of places. Service animals can help people in their jobs and animals are also used to help and care for people with illnesses and who have experienced abuse or mental illness. "We can have our sports, drinks, lively parties, and beautiful hats  but we can leave animals out of it," reported Vox.