Ready to escape the world and spend some time in nature? Here are some good options for you.

The Woodlands Cabin sits on five acres of wooded property. It is a beautiful 3-bedroom home (plus a kids’ room). The two outdoor decks surrounded by beautiful trees are the perfect place to enjoy a cup of coffee and watch deer pass by. It’s also perfect for getaways or a trip to the mountains, as it’s a 25-minute drive from Mount Hood skiing and a 15-minute drive from hikes.

Sleeps: 7

Cost: $400/person/night, 30% discount for 3 persons

Online booking: airbnb.com/rooms/21783133

This riverfront cabin sits on a full wooded acre with private access to the Washougal River. This home is located just 40 miles northeast of Portland and only 12 miles from downtown Washougal. The surrounding forest is filled with native northwestern plants and old-growth trees, some of which are more than 300 years old.

Sleeps: 7

Cost: $180/person/night, 40% discount for 2 persons

Online booking: airbnb.com/rooms/28839315

This beautiful cabin getaway is the total package with its convenient location to ski slopes, beautiful view of the valley and wonderful facilities including a 6-person hot tub (热水浴池), football table, fireplace, firepit, double shot electronic basketball game and more!

Sleeps: 14

Cost: $200/person/night, 40% discount for 2 persons

Online booking: airbnb.com/rooms/43745479

A short, leisurely drive through the pine tree-lined mountain road welcomes you to Pineland Chalet.

If the mountains are your kind of playground, you can fulfill your outdoor adventure needs with hiking, zip lining, or playing 18 holes of disc golf in the summer season. In the winter months, let your downhill dreams take flight with skiing and snowboarding.

Sleeps: 8

Cost: $250/person/night, 40% discount for 3 persons

Online booking: airbnb.com/rooms/29415461

The Kyiv City Ballet danced to a full theater in Paris for the company’s last show of its French tour. The tour has left the dancers without a place to go after the war started in Ukraine. In other times, performing at the Théatre du Chatelet would be a dream come true for the dancers. But with the ongoing war in their country, the dancers feel only a deep sadness.

“We are both physically and emotionally exhausted.” Ekaterina Kozlova said. She is the company’s assistant director. “Everyone in the ballet is worried about their families, loved ones, friends, colleagues at home. It’s been very difficult.”

The Théatre du Chatelet, in the center of Paris, offered them the stage on Tuesday for the group’s final show of a French tour. The dance director of the Paris Opera and some members of her company joined the Ukrainians for a class before performing several ballet classics together. They danced parts of Russian composer Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and The Nutcrackery.

For many of the dancers, the chance to train and dance was a way to think about “something other than the conflict in Ukraine,” Kozlova said. One of the dancers will be going to the Ukrainian border in the coming days to pick up her young daughter who was taken out of the country. Only some members of the company were traveling around France. Many of the ballet’s best dancers stayed behind, waiting to join their friends after they reached Paris.

“Most of our artists are detained in Paris.” Director Ivan Kozlova told the Paris crowd. The city of Paris and the ballet community have helped find temporary housing for the Ukrainian dancers who say they hope to continue dancing in France and elsewhere. The Chatelet theater offered the whole group a residency. But for now, Tuesday’s last-minute performance was their last. All sales from their performances will go to nongovernmental organizations collecting and sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine and neighboring countries.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), perhaps the most famous artist in the world, is perceived by many as the “mad” artist. His artistic genius is often overshadowed by those who see his paintings as only visual expressions of his troubled mind. While in part this may be true, in reality his innovative and unique artistic style was of enormous importance to a host of artists who followed in his wake. Even when openly influenced by his predecessors or contemporaries (前辈或同辈), his art remained identifiably his own, developing a distinctive style that failed to be accepted by the art-buying public in his own time. The career of Vincent van Gogh as a painter was short, but his extraordinary boldness of his technique created masterpieces that exercise a profound influence on the art of the twentieth century.

Although the artist’s first formal job after leaving school was art-related, he did not actually begin painting until years later. At 16, Vincent van Gogh entered an apprenticeship (学徒身份) at his uncle’s branch of Goupil & Cie, a Paris-based art dealership. The position involved travel and certainly exposure to the contemporary art of his day, but van Gogh would move on to religious work and a bookseller before producing the first Van Gogh painting.

His earliest works, completed from 1881 through 1883, reflect a new-comer’s attention to detail as well as hints of the new genius that would fully emerge in his later paintings. Although his sketches and watercolor drawings may, at first glance, seem two-dimensional and amateurish, they are fascinating in terms of their testament to the van Gogh’s early studies in Realism.

Vincent van Gogh produced his first drawings while staying at his parents’ home in Etten, the Netherlands, schooled chiefly by books on artistic technique. The artist restricted his first drawings to a black and white palette (调色板), believing mastery of this discipline to be essential before attempting works in color.