I first came across the concept of pay-what-you-can cafes last summer in Boone, N.C., where I ate at F.A.R.M (Feed All Regardless of Means) Café. You can volunteer to earn your meal, pay the suggested price($10) or less, or you can overpay—paying it forward for a future customer's meal. My only regret after eating there was not having a chance to give my time. So as soon as Healthy World Café opened in York in April, I signed up for a volunteer shift(轮班).

    F.A.R.M and Healthy World are part of a growing trend of community cafés. In 2003, Denise Cerreta opened the first in Salt Lake City. Cerreta now runs the One World Everybody Eats Foundation, helping others copy her pay-what-you can model.

    “I think the community café is truly a hand up, not a handout,” Cerreta said. She acknowledged that soup kitchens(施粥所) have a place in society, but people typically don't feel good about going there.

    “One of the values of the community café is that we have another approach,” she said. “Everyone eats here, no one needs to know whether you volunteered, overpaid or underpaid.”

    The successful cafés not only address hunger and food insecurity but also become necessary parts of their neighborhood – whether it's a place to learn skills or hear live music. Some teach cooking to seniors; some offer free used books. Eating or working there is a reminder that we are all in this world together.

    My 10 am—1pm shift at World-Healthy-Café began with the café manager — one of the two paid staff members. Our volunteer crew wasn't the most orderly, but we managed to prepare and serve meals with a lot of laughs in between. At the end of my shift, I ordered my earned meal at the counter, together with other volunteers. After lunch, I walked out the door, with a handful of new friends, music in my head and a satisfied belly and heart.

    The first Europeans to occupy Canada's Prince Edward Island were the French in the 1500s. At that time, its name was Ile Saint-Jean. When the British took over in 1758, they changed the name to its current one in honor of Prince Edward, the first son of Britain's King George Ⅲ.

    Today many communities find their places in Prince Edward Island, but Charlottetown is the only one that can call itself a metropolitan(大都市)area, despite the fact that it is a small one. About 60,000 people live in the city and surrounding area. The city's center area remains relatively unchanged from its 19th century beginnings. Charlottetown's boardwalk runs alongside the water, past docks, boats, shops and restaurants. Historic homes line the streets. During summer months, costumed characters walk around the city and tell of it history.

    Cavendish beach welcomes beach lovers. The gulf streams makes the water warm and wonderful for swimming, and the island's 1,760-kilometer coastline means a beach is never far away.

    Nine of PEI's 63 lighthouses will welcome visitors in the summer. Besides enjoying stunning views from the tops, visitors can browse in the small museums and learn about the island's history.

The most popular time to visit PE I is July to August, when the average temperature reaches 23℃ during the day. From January to February, the average daytime high is only -3.3℃. Each winter, an average 318.2 centimeters of snow fall on the island, covering it with a white blanket.

    Considering the island's many visitors, it's no surprise that tourism is important there. Other key industries on the island are agriculture, fishing and information technology. With so much to offer, the island is naturally a desirable place to live as well.

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To control the nation's growing problem with food wastage, the South Korean government has started a special initiative (倡议) —“Pay as You Trash”. According to the initiative, the South Korean government has three methods in place to charge citizens for the food thrown away. One is through an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) card — when users tap this card over a specially designed food waste bin, the lid will open. This waste is automatically weighed and recorded in the user's account. The user needs to settle this bill every month.

    The second billing method is through pre-paid garbage bags. These specially designed bags are priced based on the amount of space. For instance, in Seoul, a 10-liter garbage bag costs around 190 won (less than $1). There's also a bar code management system in place, in which residents (居民) throw food waste directly into dustbins and pay for it by buying bar code stickers attached to the bin.

    Even before the pay-by-weight system was introduced, South Koreans were still being charged for food waste — the cost was simply divided equally among the residents of each apartment block. The new system is not only fair, but is also designed to make consumers really feel the pinch of too much waste. The more food they throw out, the more they end up paying.

    Thanks to the initiative, residents like Seoul housewife Ms. Kwan are now adopting creative methods to avoid food waste. She makes sure to pour all the liquid out of leftover food before throwing it away. While preparing vegetables, she tries to use as much as the eatable parts as possible in order to reduce waste.

    People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions — and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.

    Rachael Jack from University of Glasgow, said that rather than scanning evenly across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.

    "We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," Jack said. "Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, while Easterners favor the eyes and ignore the mouth."

    According to Jack and his colleagues, the discovery shows that communication of human emotions is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used reliably to convey emotions in cross­cultural situations.

    The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the facial movements of 13 Western people and 13 Eastern people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, or angry. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

    It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. "The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions," Jack said. "Our data suggests that while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotions, Easterners use the eyes more and the mouth less."

    In short, the data shows that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotions. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotions. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.

    Want a wonderful travel in London? Don't miss the following!

    Cartoon Museum

    This highly entertaining London tourist attraction covers the history and development of British cartoons from the 18th century to the present day. You can find a detailed collection of all types of cartoons in this museum including caricatures (讽刺漫画) and rare examples of cartoon art: it's an ideal place to entertain kids of all ages as well as a serious collection for animation enthusiasts.

    There are over nine hundred pieces on exhibit and the museum regularly holds events where both children and adults can participate. Booking for these events is recommended due to the popularity year round of this London Museum.

    Telephone: 020 7580 8155

    Chislehurst Caves

    Chislehurst in London is home to chalk caves that were mined by hand for over 8,000 years. A tour of these caves is an exciting way to see how British people have impacted on their environment over thousands of years.

    Telephone: 020 8467 3264

    The Old Operating Theatre Museum

    The Old Operating Theatre Museum is one London museum offering a fascinating insight into the medical profession of the past. This 300-year old herb garret (阁楼) is Britain's only surviving operating theatre, with a wooden operating table and an observation stand, from which visitors can witness surgery performed.

    Telephone: 020 7188 2679

    Curzon Mayfair Cinema Museum

    Recently voted one of London's best cinemas by Time Out readers, the Curzon Mayfair cinema is everything you would expect from this particular part of town: luxurious (奢华的) and tasteful. Showing mostly art-house and independent films, the Curzon Mayfair is unique in the world of London cinema for its role in screening these films for industry and press.

    Telephone: 033 3321 0104

Having a great collection of books at home doesn't really mean that you are a person who has a passion for literature and reading. It can be a family inheritance (继承) or it can be just to impress people around you about the fact that you are a person of culture. On the other hand, there are many persons who cannot afford to buy books, because some of them are quite expensive, but they usually go to libraries and spend hours reading something that interests them a lot, or just borrow books to read at home.

From my point of view, literature is very important in our lives from several points of view. For example, reading is a means of gaining culture and enriching our knowledge in different areas of activities. It can help us have a great imagination and it makes things easier when it comes to making compositions on different themes. It gives you the possibility to speak about science, even if you don't work in this field, or you can express your opinion about a political aspect, just because you have read something connected to that.

Secondly, literature offers us the possibility to enter the world of imagination, and to leave apart the real one for a couple of hours. We come to meet kings and queens many years ago, dream in the world of the rich or imagine how life will be in the future. Sometimes, we identify ourselves with the characters in the stories we read and they can give us some clues to solve our problems and how to react in certain circumstances.

To conclude, I would like to say that literature is the perfect means to enrich our culture, to express correctly and have a rich vocabulary, to be able to interfere (干涉) in conversations in different fields of interest and to really be considered an erudite person.