“The high-speed railway trains are packed with visiting tourists, and the air smells of cumin (孜然).” This is how netizens (网友) described Zibo, a city in East China’s Shandong Province, over the past month. Zibo city recently became hot on the search on Chinese social media for its local specialty food, Zibo barbecue.

The city has recently set up special tourist trains and bus routes to attract lots of tourists, especially young people, to travel to the city to try the barbecue.

The barbecue from Zibo is unique and offers a special dining experience. It has a small stove at each table. When the skewers (烤串) are served, customers have to deal with them themselves and wrap (把……包起来) them in a thin pancake, usually with a spring onion added. The immersive (身临其境的) experience of self-made “Zibo barbecue” offered diners a sense of participation and leisure time.

The local government also took advantage of the Zibo barbecue heat to bring more tourists to the city. To encourage people to come to the city, Zibo set up a specially self-made “barbecue map” and added 21 new barbecue bus lines so that tourists can “get on the bus to rest, get off to eat”.

The sudden popularity of Zibo barbecue and its fame on the Internet is a group of several reasons. First and the most important, the city return to its normal life after the COVID-19. The popularization (推广) on social media, such as douyin, also plays a role in this. Zibo barbecue offers the latest example of step-upped efforts by the local government to develop tourism and drive economic growth after the epidemic.

Food waste is a huge problem in the whole world. It is reported that about one third of all food produced worldwide is lost or wasted every year. To solve the problem, some people thought up the idea of “leftover (剩余的) food blind boxes”. The operational (运营的) way of the model can be different from store to store.

Since March, bakeries (面包店) in Shenzhen have started selling “magic bags” with unsold fresh bread at a low price. Those “bags” are priced between 5.9 yuan and 15.9 yuan. People can order them on a WeChat mini-program called Xishi Magic Bag(惜食魔法袋). Then they can collect their orders at the bakery nearest to their places during a certain period of time, usually from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.

The mini-program was developed in April, 2021. It is said to be the first of its kind in China. Now it is available in many cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. It is popular with office workers who have little time to eat but want a healthy and quick bite while saving money. So far, it has helped save over 2,600 metric tons of food.

A woman named Wei Ting, a loyal user of Xishi Magic Bag, said the quality of the food she bought on the mini-program was excellent.

“I’m a fan of ‘blind boxes’, so I really enjoy the surprise of opening the bag.” Wei said, “What’s more, it’s really a good way to save money.”

How much space do you need to grow 10,000 heads of lettuce(生菜) each day? Not that much surprisingly. On an indoor fam in Miyagi, Japan, farmers grow that much lettuce every day. They grow it in a building smaller than half a football field.

On this farm, farmers grow lettuce on shelves. The shelves can be up to fifteen levels high! Special LED lights help the lettuce grow faster. In fact, the lettuce is ready to pick even sooner than on an outdoor farm. Another big advantage is that indoor farms don’t use as much water as outdoor farms.

On outdoor lettuce farms, there’s usually a lot of food waste. Some plants are damaged or don’t look good, so farmers can’t sell them. Sometimes farmers have to throw away more than 30% of the lettuce they grow! On this indoor farm, they throw away less than 3% of lettuce they grow.

Do you have a goal you want to achieve before your next birthday? Or by the end of the next five years, perhaps? We often hear about the importance of setting goals. We may think of these goals as the key to our happiness—achieve them and everything will be perfect. But have you ever reached a goal and instead of feeling happy, you've thought, “Is that it?” Or, “Now what?”

That feeling has a name. It’s called “arrival fallacy”—the illusion (错误的观念) that reaching our goals will bring us lasting happiness.

Whether it’s a new job, owning your dream home or anything else—there might be some initial (最初的) joy, but if you’re experiencing arrival fallacy, that may be followed by emptiness (空虚) and under stress to achieve something new.

So why does this happen? Surely achieving our goals is enough to make us happy? Not always. According to experts, we might be overestimating (高估) the happiness that such achievements will bring

And social scientist Adam Dorr says we often make the mistake of imagining our goal as a fixed object, when really it’s just part of life. But Ben Shahar adds that arrival fallacy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t set goals—in fact, we need them to help give our lives focus.

As well as large things, our goals should include many small things, like helping out more around the house or spending more time with family—small but important goals that don’t just “end”. If we really want to beat arrival fallacy, we also have to work out what makes us happy. And in surveys, spending quality time with people we care about is often number one for happiness.

Even if we do have clear career goals, experts remind us to think about enjoying the journey too—and not just the destination (目的地).

After the 2022 Spring Festival Gala, an amazing show called The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting (《只此青绿》) became a hit. The show is based on a classical Chinese painting—A Panorama of Rivers and Mountains by Wang Ximeng, an artist who lived during the Song dynasty(960-1279). Watching the show is like going on a journey back to the Song dynasty. The painting is now kept in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

Netizens made a word for the challenging move—“blue-green waist”(青绿腰). In fact, the bend(弯曲) in the show is meant to sketch the shape of steep cliffs and winding mountains in the painting. A number of people take on the challenge by bending backward. Some dancers even bend backward at a 90-degree angle. The graceful but difficult backbend has become popular. However, without years of training or proper instructions, people may hurt their bones.

The dancers in the show have trained for years before getting on stage. To show the beauty of the painting through traditional Chinese dance movements, the directors studied a lot of materials and read almost all the poems of the Song dynasty. It took them almost 20 months to put the show on the stage.