I had the honor of being elected chief of my tribe(部落). With the title came great responsibility. It was my job to make peace with the Maori Tamaki tribe, whose village we visited. Their warriors leapt from a canoe and faced us down with fierce growls, bulging eyes and much swishing of sticks. They laid a palm frond on the ground and, as head honcho, I was compelled to accept this peace offering by picking it up, then touching noses with their chief. “Kia ora”, he said, welcoming us into the woodland home of his people.

    My “tribe” was my New Zealand tour group, who had forced me into being their leader. We'd been warned that the ceremony was a serious occasion and that to laugh or even smile would be considered rude to the Tamaki. After that it was non-stop fun as they showed their ancient customs and I received instruction in performing the haka, the war dance by the All Blacks rugby team.

    Then they pulled our dinner of lamb, beef and vegetables out of the ground. It had been slow-cooked in the heat that simmers just below the surface in the geothermal(地热的) area of North Island, a Maori tradition known as a hangi that goes back an extremely long period of time.

    Obviously, this form of it is put on for tourists but it was hugely enjoyable. The journey back to the hotel was alone worth the effort, our hilarious Maori elder driver being deserving of his own television show. “The wheels on the bus go round and round,” he got us singing, while he circuited(绕……环行) a roundabout three times.

    A couple of days from the end of my trip, there was still something missing, a New Zealand icon I yearned to see to make my grand tour complete. Riding over a hill, there it was – Aotearoa. The Maori name for New Zealand translates as “Land of the long white cloud”. Can I say “Kia ora, Aotearoa?” You bet I can.

    One of my all time favorite holiday destinations is the Gold Coast. With its beautiful beaches, mountain hinterland and theme parks, the variety from one location to another is fantastic! And it's also important that it's like a playground for my children.

    The Gold Coast certainly offers something for every member of our family. We all love heading down to the beach for an early morning swim or surf. The beaches feature some of the softest golden sand and pumping waves, making them ideal for surfing. Safety is important especially when I'm out with the kids, and I feel better knowing that lifeguards are continually on patrol（巡逻）. The long coast also offer the perfect setting for a leisurely walk at sunset-a favorite activity of mine.

    Then, of course, there's the bargain-hunting in the city's center. For shopping goers there are amazing shopping centers boutiques and the usual chain stores. I always pick up loads of goodies at Pacific Fair.

    The Gold Coast is popular for its theme parks-Sea World, Wamer Bros Movie World and Dream World. The seal and dolphin presentations at Sea World keep both children and adults on the edge of their seats as the sea creatures go through a series of complicated jumps, flips and rolls. It's great entertainment and an educational window to the underwater world for the kids. Our kids also enjoy meeting the characters at Movie World and watching how real movies are made.

    Night-time is equally fun, as we usually set off to find the best local restaurants and cafes. The mix of cultures and influences has given the Gold Coast a wide variety of choices, including modem Australian, Italian, Asian and seafood, although sometimes nothing beats fish and chips!

    A visit to the Gold Coast in the Sunshine State is worthwhile and fun.

    Daily physical activity is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. For this reason, many architects and designers are working to create buildings that encourage people to make exercise a part of their ordinary routine. The movement to promote healthy activity through architecture is called active design. It began in 1998 as part of a university public health program, and it has since gained popularity in cities around the world. Active design uses a number of techniques to encourage the occupants of a building to be more active.

    One of the most important strategies of active design is inspiring people to make walking part of their routine. A particularly successful tool for promoting walking is the skip-stop elevator. These elevators stop only on every second or third floor, leaving riders to take the stairs in order to reach their destination. Another strategy of active design is to make stairs more pleasant and inviting. Instead of creating dark stairwells that are located in isolated parts of buildings, active design uses well-lit and centrally placed stairs to encourage more foot traffic. Skip-stop elevators and appealing stair design are both effective tools of active design because they offer incentive and opportunity for exercise. In fact, researchers studying a building that employs both skip-stop elevators and more attractive stair design said that 70 percent of building occupants reported using the stairs every day.

    Active design encourages physical activity using not only the interior features of a building, but the relationship between a building and its surroundings as well. A building that employs active design may integrate outdoor space in order to make the environment more engaging and promote physical activity. Some elements that architects use to incorporate the exterior with the interior are glass walls, interior gardens or park spaces, and courtyards with open ceilings, all of which de-emphasize the boundaries between inside and outside. These elements make the building more physically and mentally invigorating. Similarly, by increasing the number of entrances and exits to a building, architects can help keep a building's users interested in their surroundings by providing a variety of routes for them to use. If people continue to be stimulated by new sights or experiences, they are less likely to choose the quickest and easiest path to their destination and may instead choose a more physically challenging route.

    The World Happiness Report, a United Nations agency report, measures (估量) how happy people are, and why. Norway is the happiest place on earth—beating neighbour Denmark from the number one position.

    Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Finland are among the top five, while the Central African Republic came last. Western Europe and North America took up most of the places at the top of table, with the US and UK at 14th and 19th respectively.

    The World Happiness Report mainly depends on asking a simple question of more than 1,000 people every year in more than 150 countries. “Imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top,” the question asks. “The top of the ladder is the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder is the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

    The average (平均的) result is the country's score—from Norway's 7.54 to the central African Republic's 2.69. But the report also tries to explain why one country is happier than another. It looks at reasons including economic strength, social support, freedom of choice, and generosity.

    This year's report also has a text titled “restoring (恢复) American happiness”, which examines why happiness levels in the United States are falling, despite continually-increasing economic improvement. “The United States can and should raise happiness by solving American's social problems—rising inequality and distrust—rather than focusing mainly on economic growth,” the authors said.

    Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which published the report, said President Donald Trump's policies were likely to make things worse.

    Many youths want to learn how to drive cars. This year one sixth of undergraduates in Beijing have registered at driving school. The students, mostly from majors such as business management or imitational trade, will finish their driving courses within 20 days or so.

    Training costs have dropped to 4, 500 yuan for students, according to the Haidian Driving School in Beijing. The price is not really low, but students will accept it, seeing it as an investment (投资) in their future. Familiarity with the operation of computers and fluent English are the basic skills graduating students need to find a job. But a driver s permit has become another factor (因素).

    "In the job market, owning a driver's permit sometimes strengthens a graduating student's competitiveness for a good position," says Li Hua, an undergraduate at the China University of Political Science and law.

    Cars will become a necessary part of many people's lives in the coming years, and it is difficult to get a permit out of campus because of the pressures on working people's time. "Having a full-time job after graduation offers limited time to learn to drive. We senior students have plenty of spare time, plenty of oppurtunity to learn," says another undergraduate at the university.

    Wu Dong, an official at the driving school, said undergraduates were very able and serious, and could grasp in an hour what ordinary people took four hours to learn. In this driving school, middle-aged people, young women and college students are the main customers.

    From March 1, 2018, to get a driver's permit, a beginner is now required to have at least 86 hours' practice before the final road test.

The hens look up at me from their nesting boxes. They seem slightly annoyed but unsurprised. A child runs up, pushes one of the chickens aside, and snatches two eggs. Around me, a half-dozen more children and adults collect eggs while a half-dozen others hand-feed dried mealworms to birds flocking around our ankles. I reach for an egg from an empty nest. There is something perfect about the way it fits warmly in the palm of my hand before I transfer it into a pretty wire basket provided to me by my hosts. 

The egg harvest is a brief, carefully designed agritourism experience offering an experience of the labor rather than just having a bite of food. Snatching a few eggs and uprooting a few vegetables on the farm tour donˈt constitute a full dayˈs work, but it is also a useful reminder that food doesnˈt just magically appear on restaurant plates and grocery store shelves. Of course, visitors can take those eggs home or bring them to the on-farm restaurant, Clay, where a chef will use them to prepare breakfast. 

A few centuries of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization have collected people into cities, but the attraction of the countryside has always remained. In the new urban-centered world, enterprising farmers have found plenty of opportunities to sell their rural lifestyle along with their crops. Italy promoted the modern model for combining agriculture and tourism in the wake of World War Ⅱ, when the national government encouraged rural populations to continue producing food rather than move to urban areas in search of more profitable jobs. 

Agritourism acts as an umbrella term for a wide variety of activities that take place on farms, including farmstays, where guests sleep on-site. For varying investments of time, energy, and money, anyone can engage in our farming system, giving consumers a peek behind the farm-to-table world.