Some websites help make our travel easier! The following are some of them. You may find one very useful before you start your journey.

Home Exchange

You list your house on the site, find another house where you’d like to stay, and contact the house owner to see if he or she wants to exchange homes. This exchange system lets you live like a local in a comfortable house or apartment instead of a tiny and expensive hotel room. In addition, you needn’t pay any accommodation fees!

Tripadvisor

It is the biggest online community of travelers and also the first stop for vacation planners. Not only can you book flights, hotels, car rentals, and get tickets for scenery spots here, but you can also get reviews and tips from other travelers. The destination guides on Tripadvisor are often much better than the expensive guidebooks in a bookstore.

Yapta

Yapta stands for Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant. Yapta reminds you when the price for a particular flight drops. It can do it even after you purchase your tickets, giving you a chance to get a refund (退款) of the difference from the airline. If you prefer, Yapta will bargain (讨价还价) with the airline on your behalf for a $15 fee.

Roomorama

Roomorama is a website for short-term rental website. With its large choice of house listings worldwide, you can find whichever house suits your needs. Whether you’re looking for a single bedroom or a large apartment, Roomorama has that all covered! It also provides a unique and secure payment system to keep your money secure. Roomorama can only hand over the payment code (密码) to the host until you check in.

“With faithfulness, I will try my best to aid the physicians in their work, and devote myself to helping those patients who I attend to. Every day, nurses take these words from the Florence Nightingale oath (誓言) to heart, ensuring their patients’ welfare—but some nurses，like Jennifer Smith, take that oath a step further.

Last November, Jennifer got an urgent call from John Burley, one of her patients who had been hospitalized with pneumonia (肺炎). With no other family members to step in to help, a local animal shelter adopted his dog Boomer.

“I came into work on Monday morning after Thanksgiving, the phone ringing at 7 am,” Jennifer recalled. “John was calling from his ward (病房), saying ‘Boomer was in the shelter! Boomer was in the shelter! Aware that the 12-year-old dog that he had had since it was born meant all the world to him, she said yes without any hesitation, when John asked Jennifer if she could take care of Boomer. She said that knowing his beloved dog was safe would make a huge positive impact on John’s recovery.

The first thing Jennifer had to do was to track Boomer down and she finally found him at the Rome Humane Society. The following day, she drove to the shelter and carried out the adoption plan, letting John know Boomer was doing well. What’s more, Jennifer was given the green light to bring Boomer to work with her. During his stay in hospital, Jennifer brought Boomer to visit his owner several times a day. The cute dog soon became a favorite with staff and patients there.

To Jennifer, keeping 60-year-old John and Boomer together is just a natural act of helping people. “There are just so many worries in the world right now. If I can take one worry away from John, that’s the least I can do,” she told CNN.

A study from Denmark suggests that growing up in the countryside may help you stay in good mental health as an adult. The research involving nearly a million people found children, who live in green areas, are 55% less likely to develop a mental health disorder in later life.

The researchers believe green spaces help create friendly communities where people enjoy talking to others, as well as encouraging people to exercise. This helps improve a child’s cognitive (认知的) development, which may positively affect their mental health.

The research was led by Dr Kristine Engemann from Aarhus University in Denmark. The researchers used satellite data collected between 1985 and 2013 to assess (评估) the green space around the participants’ childhood homes. This data was then compared against the risk of developing mental disorders later in life. “After mastering a huge amount of data, as well as other information such as house location and disease diagnoses from Denmark, we compared it with satellite images which show green space of individual when growing up,” Dr Engemann said.

Results showed that those who grew up surrounded by lots of green space were less at risk of a mental health problem. Dr Engemann said, “We find that the longer you have been surrounded by green space from birth and up to the age of 10, the lower the risk of developing a mental disorder. There is increasing evidence that the natural environment plays a more important role in mental health than thought before. Our study gives us a better understanding of its importance across the broader population.”

Noise, air pollution, infections (传染病) and poor social and economic conditions increase the risk of a mental disorder, according to the study. The researchers are calling on city planners to design greener cities to improve the public’s mental health.

We have scenic beauty all around us, but looking around, much of it is covered with food packages, plastic bottles, and other rubbish. Despite warning signs and boards that constantly say “No littering here!”, people are unwilling to understand the significance of keeping public places clean. However, Khao Yai National Park in Thailand has taken an unusual step to make sure tourists clean up their own trash.

The park has begun sending trash back to the litterbugs (乱扔垃圾者) with a polite note saying “You forgot these things at Khao Yai National Park” to remind people that littering in public places is against the rules. Mr. Varawut Silpa-archa, minister of Natural Resources and Environment of Thailand, posted a series of pictures on Facebook related with the new step. He posted a picture of a trash-filled box that was ready to be shipped with the words—“YOUR TRASH—WE’LL SEND IT BACK TO YOU.”

Varawut explained that throwing about trash could endanger wild animals, which might eat it by mistake when searching for food. He said littering in the park could carry a fine of up to 500,000 Thai Baht (about $16,000 U.S. dollars), a prison sentence of up to five years, or both. And the offending (违法的) visitors will also be banned from returning to the park.

The officials matched the trash to its owners by taking address details from the camping equipment rental forms. To make the process easier, people will be allowed to enter the park only after writing down their address.

“We think Khao Yai National Park’s new step has made a great contribution to maintaining our country’s natural resources,” Charinya Kiatlapnachai, director of the tourism authority of Thailand, told The Washington Post. “This gesture is an effective way to ensure we all do our part to help our country remain clean, safe and beautiful.”