Come for the food, stay to beat your waiter.

At the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in Nanjing, China, the clientele are allowed and even encouraged to take our their daily frustration and rage in a mostly harmless fashion: by attacking specially trained employees. The customers may rant, smash glass, or perhaps even kick some shins if the mood inspires them. The employees are provided with protective gear.

Most of the patrons, as it turns out, are women who work in the service or entertainment industries. Patrons can also request that their servers dress in a particular way, so as to better resemble a boss or co-worker. The term ‘Rising Sun,’ meanwhile, generally refers to China’s neighbor, Japan - a geographical relationship which China has rarely, if ever, enjoyed.

In case of a particularly stressed client, the bar’s owner, Mr. Wu, provides one further service. He has recruited psychology students from local universities to offer psychiatric counseling.

(Picture: ‘Bus Uncle,’ Hong Kong)

Australians. Hate. Cane toads.

They have every reason to. Introduced in the 1930s from Hawaii to control native cane beetles, cane toads failed in their mission miserably. But they have since reproduced like rabbits on crystal meth, taking Australia’s ecology by storm. They are also studded with bufotoxin-laced warts, which are poisonous enough to kill hungry local crocodiles, let alone beloved pet dogs. Australians are often encouraged to slaughter the buggers wherever they find them, and one scientific research project is in the works to turn them all male, causing population collapse.

All the same, some Australians find themselves with a grudging respect for these seemingly unstoppable creatures. A 1988 documentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, approached the subject with fantastically deadpan Australian humour. And a 2003 short film, ‘What Happened to Baz?‘ won the Best Comedy award at the St. Kilda Film Festival.

So inevitably, they have been turned into fashion accessories. Cane toad purses, wallets and handbags are a common sight throughout this island continent, land of Waltzing Matilda and Stirling Mortlock. Their carcasses can serve as fertilizer, and properly prepared - skinned, their poisonous glands removed - general agreement is that they taste like chicken. Because with an estimated two hundred million toads to go around, there’s no reason to let them go to waste.

This shark from a shark derby in Nova Scotia has nothing to do with this post, but its a damn cool thing in a random place as sharks aren’t supposed to look like this in Nova Scotia (at least I hope not while I’m surfing!)

One of the best responses to this site as been “it is like a bag of potato chips, once you start reading…”

Do you have some cool or weird thing in mind that could grace the pages of CTIRP?

Register below and create your own posting with a short bio and a link to your site if you would like.

Tips: Keep it short, sweet, and use a gripping title. Great photos are also a must! So be creative and share those international oddities. REGISTER HERE

Beat your wife in India, and you’ll be beaten back. By a mob of women in pink saris.

They are the Gulabi (’Pink’) Gang, in one of India’s northern states and poorest regions. Theirs is an area comprised of 20% untouchables, beset by drought and unemployment, and targeted in the past for a massive jobs-for-work program. But local government officials regularly come down against the poor: a policeman recently arrested an untouchable, but didn’t register a case against him. The Gulabi Gang stormed the precinct, and gave the policeman a thrashing.

Their spitfire leader says they are ‘a gang for justice.’ Sampat Pal Devi was forced into marriage at the age of 12, and had her first child when she was 13. This is hardly unusual: in village society, the deck is heavily stacked against women’s rights and education. She worked as a government health worker, organizing meetings with neighborhood women on her own time.

They aren’t all women. Men speak with equal passion not just about dowries or child marriages, but about diminishing water resources and farm subsidies. The Gulabi Gang leaped into the spotlight only after it intercepted three tractors of wheat being pilfered from a public distribution program. They beat the thieves with lathis - traditional Indian sticks - and sandals.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine is known as ‘the underground cathedral of Poland.`This is because an entire city has been carved out of its very walls. Over the years, legions of anonymous workers carved bits of their workplace into everything they could think of, from saints to gnomes. Starting in the late 19th century, three miners decided to etch out a whole chapel as well, to the patron saint of mining, St. Kinga. It took them sixty-eight years.Salt used to be as valuable as silver. First evidence of this mine’s existence comes from 1044 A.D., and tourists have been recorded since the 15th Century - including Poland’s premier astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus. The twists and turns of the mine – only three percent of which tourists can access - stretch for two hundred kilometers, and go as far as three hundred meters underground. Some of the tunnels are so wide that they were used as airplane factories by the Nazis.Buried beneath one of the most Catholic countries on the planet, the mine also has restaurants, bars, and a formal dance area that is great for weddings. And lest you ever forget where you stand, even the chandlers are dripping with salt.

Every year in New York City, a five-foot penguin walks the streets.

He is actually half-penguin, half-chicken: “Chengwin.” And for whatever reason, this oversized Sesame Street hallucination has become an annual fixture in the streets of downtown Gotham. He always arrives with a cheering hipster mob, oftentimes with a live band in tow, to battle his archnemesis: his half-brother, Chunk. Chunk is half-chicken, half-skunk, and has his own entourage of black-clad musclenecks in dark shades. People rarely cheer for Chunk.

They battle. They literally rumble in the streets, mostly by way of head butts and kicks to the shin. But this is more than a mere guerrilla theater street fight: it is Chengwin versus Chunk, good versus evil. Ignore the hipsters behind the curtains: this is a morality tale, a fable come to life, and the fairy tale ending always wins out. Always, Chengwin emerges victorious.

The half-chicken/half-something family has expanded over the years: there is Chove, a half-chicken/half-dove whom Chengwin married in 2006; Chabio, half-chicken/half-Fabio, who is dreamy; and Chixon, half-chicken/half-Nixon, who is cantankerous. There have been weddings, foot races, and a Million Chengwin March. But always, there is the war.

Don’t ask why.

Dolphins play frisbee with bubble rings.

This suggests that they understand both play, and fluid dynamics. After first creating invisible vortices in the water with their tailfins, these dolphins - particularly children - then infuse the vortices with air from of their blowhole. The result are called air-core vortex rings, and can be up to two feet in diameter.

The invisible dance of physics keeps the ring from going anywhere, at least for about ten seconds. But that is long enough for some playful porpoises to nudge the ring along wherever they like, and admire their handiwork. When they’re finished with their liquid toy, they bite it, and it breaks into thousands of tiny bubbles that, far more predictably, float to the surface.

They can also create helices up to twenty feet long. The same rules apply.

Ring-blowing stops entirely when children are outnumbered by adults. Which suggests the worrisome possibility that all species eventually grow up to be killjoys.

Moko Jumbies first protected believers from evildoers. Originally a West African tradition, men and women on gigantic stilts would dress in long gowns and masquerade as gods. Gods can look down on humanity from above, and foresee danger better than mere mortals. The stilt-walkers would collect donations, from revelers and onlookers on second-story balconies.

They now dance in the streets of Trinidad and Tobago for every Carnival. ‘Moko’ is the name of the an old African god, ‘the diviner.’ ‘Jumbies’ - ‘ghosts’ - was added by the emancipated slaves. After decades of decline, a man by the name of ‘Dragon’ Glen de Souza actually revived the Moko Jumbie tradition in the early 1990s, in an effort to teach children how to dance.

There is now one premier school for Moko Jumbies in all the world: the Keylemanjahro School of Art & Culture. It is open six days a week, has about one hundred and fifty students, and takes its name from Key (to open doors), le (the first two letters of ‘leader’), man (as in ‘mankind’), jah (the Rastafarian word for God), and ro, for the roar of the crowd as the Moko Jumbies come down the street.

This school keeps children off the streets. They often practice long after sunset, enjoying the cool night air in the midst of their exertion: each stilt can weigh up to twenty-five pounds. The youngest student was Dragon’s own son: he was two.

Chinese zombies devour life force. George Romero’s zombies only eat brains. That’s the difference.

‘Zombie’ isn’t actually the word. The literal translation of Jiang Shi comes out as ’stiff corpse.’ But in English, the best translation reads, ‘Hopping Vampire.’ They hop, because Chinese undead suffer from rigor mortis. They are also blind, and depend on their sense of smell.

The origins of Jiang Shi might stem from the old tradition of carrying dead bodies on bamboo poles. The resulting bounce, up and down along the long road home, gave them the appearance of hopping. And as vampires, these poor folks need your life energy, your qi.

According to the movies - of which there were plenty, in 1980s Hong Kong - Chinese hopping vampires have long tongues and fingernails, and dress in Qing Dynasty clothing. They can be battled with spells (written with chicken’s blood on thin yellow paper), an eight-sided Baqua Mirror, a sword made of lucky Chinese coins powered by the light of a full moon, blood (which freezes them in place), and sticky rice. The sticky rice is lethal.

Funerals are an opportunity to go out with some style. When Josephine Baker died in France, Paris came to a standstill. Jim Henson banned people from wearing black, and had a chorus of Muppets sing the send-off. Hunter S. Thompson had his ashes shot into space, because let’s be honest: he really, really loved guns.

In Ghana, they might bury you in a giant shoe.

In a suburb outside of Accra, the fantasy coffin industry is booming. Many of these hand-crafted creations reflect the trades of those who have passed: shoes for the cobblers, hammers for the carpenters - perhaps a Coca-Cola bottle for the street salesman.

Hens are particularly popular for young mothers, to symbolize maternal love. Occasionally an unrepentant drinker will partake of one last gigantic bottle of Heineken. A gynaecologist once ordered a six-foot uterus. The idea is to leave with dignity, and pride in a life well lived.

If in doubt, a gigantic Bible remains a popular option. And Cadillacs.

This is a fairly new idea. Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a village chief commissioned a famous carver for a gigantic cocoa bean, then a major crop in Ghana. The chief soon died - but why let all that hard work go to waste?

And so a tradition was born.