If you have a taste for the USA and time and money are in short supply, our range of Mini Adventures are just the ticket for experiencing North America's most incredible parts in just a few days.

    These 3- and 4- day tours get you out of the city and off the beaten path in a flash, making the most of your time and money. From the thundering Niagara Falls and the magnificent Grand Canyon to the most iconic landscape in America, Monument Valley, our Mini Adventures serve up a huge helping of American pie!

Vegas to Grand Canyon

4 days from Las Vegas

May-Oct from US $ 789

USA West-Camping

Cowboys, canyons and Indians — Need we say more? Explore Zion & Bryce Canyon National Parks before a night with the Navajo people deep in the heart of Monument Valley, then top it all off with the grandest canyon on earth!

Los Angeles to Grand Canyon

4 days from Los Angeles

May-Oct from US$649

USA West-Camping

    Escape the hustle and bustle of Los Angles for some Desert Southwest action! Travel from Lake Havasu to the Grand Canyon, then along the iconic Route66, over the Hoover Dam and into Las Vegas for an included limousine tour that you'll never forget!

San Francisco to Yosemite

3 days from San Francisco

Jan-Sep from US $ 429

USA West-Camping

    Cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains for the crystal clear waters of Lake Tahoe and on to Yosemite Valley for a full day of exploration. Spectacular views, adventurous activities and abundant wildlife awaits you on this amazing short break in Western USA.

New York to Niagara Falls

3 days from New York

Jun-Sep from US  $599

USA East-Hotel

    Leave city life behind in New York and venture deep into ‘up state' New York to the thundering wonder of incomparable Niagara Falls before a night in the Finger Lakes with the waterfalls and Wineries as your neighbors.

    Typing with one hand when the other one is occupied can be a real pain, so imagine having to type with just one foot. It's got to be a nightmare, but 21-year-old Hu Huiyuan from China's Anhui Province is using her only functional foot to write not just a few sentences, but an entire fiction novel!

    Born prematurely(过早地), Hu was diagnosed with cerebral palsy(脑瘫) when she was only 10 months old. This left her permanently paralyzed—the only parts of her body she can move are her head and left foot. As she grew older, she learned how to perform everyday tasks using her foot.

    Despite not having received formal education, Hu is surprisingly well-spoken. Over the years, with the help of her mother, she taught herself to read and write. “I'm not a genius, but I'm very focused,” she said, modestly. “When I watched TV in my childhood, I often learned words on the screen.”

    “When I was teaching her how to speak, I had to repeat every single word a thousand times before she got it, ”Hu's mother said. “But once she mastered the word. I felt satisfied.”

    With time going by, Hu's language got so proficient that she set out to write a story about the pursuit of dreams and love. She's doing this by typing out every single word on her computer using only one foot.

    In spite of all these setbacks, Hu is able to type 20 to 30 words a minute. She has already written six chapters—that's 60,000 words—and says she only has two more chapters to go before the novel is complete.

    Robots make me nervous—especially the ones which seem to think for themselves. I was embarrassed to admit this till I heard that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, felt the same way.

Gates said in an interview with the social networking and news website Reddit: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent．That should be positive if we manage well. A few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern."

    Well, maybe I don't have to worry about my computer and kitchen equipment yet. After I use them I can always pull the plug. But in the future, machines might find a way to prevent us from switching them off. There's a terrible thought!

    Maybe the problem with computers too clever for us is not that they are evil like some we've seen in sci-fi movies. What could put us in danger is that they might be too efficient. That's what philosopher Nick Bostrom from Oxford University believes. He says that machines are indifferent to humans and in pursuit of their own goals，the destruction of people might be just additional damage. Bostrom gives us an example: A machine which might have its only goal to produce as many paperclips as possible might look at human bodies as extra material for paperclips and go after you. Because it is, well, a machine, it would not take pity on you.

    It's a good thing that American writer Isaac Asimov thought about how far robots can go and left us his three rules of robotics. They state that a robot may not hurt a human being or allow the human being to come to harm.

I'm glad my machines at home are "dumb". All my cleaner wants to take over is the carpet in my living room. Let's hope they don't create an appliance which wants to take over the world!

    Emily Urich 18 years old Canada

    A 1ot of teens aren't responsible, and that's where I'm different. Not just about school but everyday things, like being able to pay my own credit card(信用卡)bills on time.

    The first time I got a cartoon book was on my third birthday. From then on, I fell in deep love with it. And can you guess how many cartoon books I've read? I don't really know the exact number. But I have three full boxes of them under my bed.

    Joe Miller 16 years old America

    I'm proud of doing things in my own way. So whenever somebody wants me to do something or whatever it is, I feel like they're all other people's thoughts, not really mine. But like others, I love reading, too.

    When I first took skiing lessons, I found it exciting. For skiing racing, there's no question that I'm better than most boys. I think it's fun. I mean, it is a challenge. It's where I picked up the idea of needing a challenge always in my life. In order to improve my skiing skills, I have read many books and magazines about it.

    An Qi 15 years old China

    I'm different because I prefer to drop out of the world to create my own world. I'd like to build a house on a mountain. And I choose to live without electricity, a telephone, or even indoor plumbing(水管装置).

    I have many hobbies such as traveling, reading, writing and spending time with children. I love children because they are smart and creative. They always have many strange ideas. It makes me excited.

    I want to do something for Hope Project and become a country school teacher.

Foreign visitors to the UK might be disappointed when they learn that not everyone there speaks like Harry Potter and his friends. Usually, there's an assumption by many non-Brits that everyone in Britain speaks with what's known as a Received Pronunciation (RP, 标准发音) accent, also called "the Queen's English". However, while many people do talk this way, most Britons speak in their own regional accents.

    Scouse, Glaswegian and Black Country – from Liverpool, Glasgow and the West Midlands – are just three of the countless non-RP accents that British people speak with. There are even differences in accents between towns or cities just 30 kilometers apart. What is even more disappointing is that not speaking in a RP accent may mean a British person is judged and even treated differently in their everyday life.

    In a 2015 study by The University of South Wales, videos of people reading a passage in three different UK accents were shown to a second group of people. The group then rated how intelligent they thought the readers sounded. The lowest-rated accent was Brummie, native to people from Birmingham, a city whose accent is considered working class.

    However, there is no need to be disappointed though you are not speaking in an RP accent. In fact, doing the opposite may even give you strength.

Kong Seong-jae, 25, is an internet celebrity from Seoul. After studying in the UK, he picked up several regional accents. He's now famous for his online videos, where he shows off the various accents he's learned. "British people usually get really excited when I use some of their local dialect words, and they become much friendlier. I think it makes a bit of bond between local people and foreigners to speak in their local accent," he said.

    So if you're working on perfecting your British accent, try to speak like someone from Liverpool, Glasgow or Birmingham. You may not sound like Harry Potter, but you are likely to make more friends.

    I.M. Pei, the Chinese-American, who was regarded as one of the last great modernist architects, has died at the age of 102.

    Although he worked mostly in the United States, Pei will always be remembered for a European project: His redevelopment of the Louvre Museum in Paris in the 1980s. He gave us the glass and metal pyramid in the main courtyard, along with three smaller pyramids and a vast subterranean (地下的) addition to the museum entrance.

    Pei was the first foreign architect to work on the Louvre in its long history, and initially his designs were fiercely opposed. But in the end, the French—and everyone else—were won over. Winning the fifth Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, he was thought as giving the 20th century "some of its most beautiful inside spaces and outside forms … His talent and skill in the use of materials approach the level of poetry."

    After studying architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Pei set up his own architectural practice in New York in 1955.

    Designing the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in 1964 established him as a name. His East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1978 changed people's ideas of a museum. The site was an odd trapezoid (梯形) shape. Pei's solution was to cut it in two. The resulting building was dramatic, light and elegant—one of the first crowd-pleasing cathedrals of modern art.

    Though known as a modernist, and notable for his forms based on arrangements of simple geometric (几何的) shapes, he once urged Chinese architects to look more to their architectural tradition rather than designing in a western style.

    In person, I.M. Pei was good-humored, charming and unusually modest. His working process was evolutionary, but innovation (创新) was never an intended goal.

    "Stylistic originality is not my purpose," he said. "I want to find the originality in the time, the place and the problem."