Colourful times: Spring brings lots of colour for people in India and Nepal. A spring festival called Holi, the Festival of Colours, is celebrated by thousands of observers of Hindu. At the festival, celebrants throw coloured powder at each other to rejoice in the wonderful colours of spring and to bid farewell to the winter season. At night, bonfires are lit and people gather together in an atmosphere of revelry, during which lots of singing and dancing take place. Depending on different local customs, the festivities may go on for a couple of days or for over two weeks. As well as spring, Holi celebrates brotherhood among people of different backgrounds.

Pink is out: A survey conducted in Britain refutes the idea that women love to wear the traditionally feminine colour pink. Instead, blue, black, red, purple and green (in that order) were far ahead of pink as the colour women pick as their favourite wardrobe hue. Not only that, but the survey, which was done by Dressipi, a fashion recommendation site, also found that pink was actually one of the colours most disliked by women, along with yellow and orange. Other interesting findings relate to hair colour. Brunettes like to wear red, while blonds prefer to dress in black.

Tubing to school: For many children around the world, the method of getting to school is by taking a bus or walking. However, for some children in the Philippines, it means riding a tube across a river. The children live in a village in Rizal province and to get to their elementary school, they haul their inflated inner tubes to the river, jump on and paddle across. Sometimes there may be two or three kids to a tube and they can often end up quite wet. If the river is swollen, they’ll stay home from school that day. Local residents have requested that a footbridge be built for the kids.

China’s England: Visitors to a unique town in the Songjiang District of Shanghai, China might think they are in England. Called Thames Town, after the river that flows through London, England, this town looks and feels like an English village with its cobblestone streets and Victorian architecture. Lots of housing was made available in the form of single family homes and the town can accommodate a population of 10,000. When the houses came on the market, they sold rapidly. Thames Town has typical English businesses, such as a fish and chip shop and a pub. There is also a village green complete with a Gothic-style church.