As a Chinese saying goes, "Taste is actually a memory of childhood". Local specialty food may not be popular among all people, but it offers outsiders a glimpse of local culture and history.

    Gongcheng "oil tea" is such a kind of food that would be considered "weird" by many first-time visitors to the remote county in the north of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Many people dislike its bitter and astringent(涩的) flavor when they take a sip.

    "It felt like drinking Chinese herbal medicine. I never expected that I would gradually accept it afterwards, and even become addicted to it," said a traveler surnamed Zhang who comes from Shijiazhuang in northern China's Hebei province.

    Langshan village is said to be the birthplace of Gongcheng "oil tea" whose ideal ingredients are green tea and fermented tea. The village has preserved well its buildings and roads dating back to late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), as well as its traditional way of making the special tea.

    Lin Fengyou, 60, introduced the cooking process. She looks younger than her age, and attributes this to the benefits of drinking "oil tea" throughout the year.

    The first procedure is to use a wooden hammer to pound the tea while heating it in an iron pot, and then add edible oil and boiled water afterwards. She filters off the solid residues(余渣), and pours the glue-like green tea soup into bowls. Then, she adds salt, caraway seed, green onion, dried rice, fried groundnuts, sliced taro and fried beans.

    The taste of the "oil tea" is a mixture of the distinctive flavors of all its ingredients. Local people usually eat it together with glutinous rice(糯米) balls, rice dumplings and glutinous rice cake.

    The villagers consume "oil tea" three times a day. The tea soup is a healthy and refreshing food. "The tea soup to us is coffee to Westerners", said Lin. "But it is tastier."

    A middle-aged man with a long beard was caught by the police for bad behavior and property damage. The man, Bill Wild, checked into a hotel last night, telling the clerk he would pay cash in advance and would be staying for four nights. He then asked her where the nearest store was and she told him it was John-Johns.

    Wild went to the store and bought three gallons of honey and four gallons of chocolate syrup (糖浆). The cashier asked him why he wanted these things and he replied, "I'm trying to become a sweeter person." The cashier smiled at the joke. Wild drove back to the hotel. He opened all bottles and poured them into the bathtub. He added warm water to the mix. He tuned the radio to an opera music station, took off his clothes, jumped into the tub, and started singing loudly with the music.

    Fifteen minutes later, the neighbor phoned the clerk complaining about the noise. The clerk knocked on Wild's door, but he just kept singing. She phoned his room, but he didn't answer. Then she called the police, who arrived quickly. They broke into the room. The floor was covered in water and the bathtub was full of chocolate and honey. "He seemed so nice and friendly. Who'd have thought he was a bathtub-singing nut?" said the clerk. The police said this was the third time that Wild had been arrested for this kind of behavior.

    More and more people in America are celebrating the Indian holiday Diwali. Diwali is Hindi for “row of lights.” It is the most important holiday in India.

    Many people around the world are beginning to celebrate it as well. The United States is one of the places where the festival is becoming more common. Diwali celebrations can now be found at American landmarks like Disney land in California and New York City's Times Square. They are also held in many parks and museums.

    Neeta Bhasin created the Times Square event. She said Indian immigrants (移民) have found great success in America. But, she said, many Americans still do not know much about India. So, she decided to act. "I felt it's about time that we should take India to mainstream America and show India's rich culture, heritage, arts and variety to the world, "she said, "And I couldn't find a better place than the center of the universe: Times Square."

    Bhasin came to the United States from India 40 years ago. She is president of ASB Communications, the marketing firm behind Diwali at Times Square. Tens of thousands of people attend the event, now in its fourth year.

    In India, Diwali is a five-day harvest festival held just before the Hindu New Year. The exact dates change from year to year but Diwali is always in the fall. Celebrations include lighting oil lamps or candles called diyas. The lights represent "a victory of knowledge over ignorance, light over darkness, good over evil."

    A Diwali celebration will light up Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim this year. Visitors can watch performances of traditional Indian dances and take part in a Bollywood dance party. The event is part of a Festival of Holidays program at the theme park to show cultural traditions from around the world.

    Traveling abroad for leisure is becoming more and more popular for Chinese. The UK is high up in the list of places that the Chinese want to visit. There is a sense of mystery about the UK: it's often the images of England's green parks, countryside and Victorian houses that people point to as an alternative to polluted, overcrowded cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou.

    The capital is viewed as modern and dynamic, while being filled deep with history. When asked what other images are thought of by the UK, the reply is often "the Queen, tea and Oxbridge". So what's stopping them actually coming? Sebastian Wood, the British ambassador in Beijing, has described the UK as a "fortress", and while this is perhaps an exaggeration (夸张), Britain does have a reputation as a country that is harder to access.

    The main problem for Chinese tourists is obvious. Although visa applications are now completed online, visitors are still required to visit one of 12 UK centers across the country for a face-to-face interview and fingerprinting. If you don't live near one of these centers already, you'd have to travel some distance to get there.

    Another problem is also to be mentioned. If travelers from China visit the UK, they also want to cover as much ground as possible. But the UK is not included in the Schengen visa, which allows access to a host of 26 European countries such as France and Germany. So it makes the former seem less worth it.

    There is also the issue of cost:￡47 for a Schengen visa, ￡82 for the UK. On top of this, the UK is viewed as stricter in its handling of visas compared with the rest of Europe, fed by urban legends of rejected applications. In the end, the decision comes down to one question: Is Britain worth a visit?

    The Bermuda Triangle is an area in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, near Florida in the USA, where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared mysteriously.

    ①The earliest suggestion of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a September 17, 1950 article. Two years later, published "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door", covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962 issue of American Legion magazine. In it, author Allan W. Eckert wrote that the flight leader had been heard saying, "We are entering white water. Nothing seems right. We don't know where we are." In the February 1964, the article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" argued that Flight 19 and other disappearances were just part of strange events in the area.

    ②Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural ideas to explain the events. One explanation refers to leftover technology from the mysterious lost continent of Atlantis. Some of the Triangle writers related the events to UFOs. This idea was used by Steven Spielberg for his science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the lost Flight 19 aircrews were taken by aliens.

    ③But there are also some explanation relating to nature. For example, laboratory experiments carried out in Australia have proven that bubbles containing natural gas can sink a large ship by decreasing the density(密度) of the water. Because it has been assumed that the eruption of volcanoes(火山)may produce much natural gas, making large areas of bubbles under sea so that water is no longer able to provide enough supporting power for ships. If this were the case, such an area forming around a ship could cause it to sink very rapidly and without any warning.

    ④Violent weather is likely to be another reason. Powerful storms forming in tropical(热带的)waters have caused thousands of deaths and caused billions of dollars in damage. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle.

For hundreds of years, Africans have preserved their history through storytelling. But some Africans worry that oral traditions will be lost to the Internet connections and social media.

This has led a Nigerian woman named Elizabeth Kperrun to create a mobile phone application as a way to preserve African folk stories. She calls her mobile app AfroTalez, which tells children's stories that teach moral lessons.

"We can't teach kids something by telling them, 'Don't do this'. I think kids need context to understand. In a story somebody stole something and then something bad happened to them. Alternatively, somebody else did something good and they ended up happy or rich."

"Hello children. My name is Liz and I'd like to tell you a story about tortoises, elephants, and ..." The voice of "Aunt Liz" narrates the story, while a full-screen animation appears. An arrow signals when it's time to move on. There are also quizzes on object recognition and counting throughout.

Kperrun asks her older relatives to help her collect stories for the application. The stories come from an ethnic group living in southeast Nigeria and northwest Cameroon. "I want to keep it centered on folk stories, not the ones that Walt Disney has made really popular... It's fair and respectful to keep certain cultures alive because folk stories are part of the tapestry that keeps cultures together." Kperrun once said.

Kperrun writes and reads the stories. Her business partner and husband Idamiebi Ilamina-Eremie does the animation (动画).

AfroTalez is available for Android users and can be downloaded for free. So far, AfroTalez has more than 50,000 users. Funding for the app has been a major challenge. Kperrun hopes to use a crowdfunding campaign to help fund the next version of AfroTalez to be released soon.

Kperrun believes technology doesn't have to destroy or replace traditions. Her goal is to combine them to keep African culture alive. She says "Africa is our home, but we are so eager to become Western that we are forgetting things that are really important and should be passed on of who we are, and I don't think that's right."