Update: Media & Plans

It’s been a bit of a while since I’d made a post so I thought I’d put together an update of my upcoming plans and also put up a little bit of media coverage I’ve had in the last few weeks :).

Firstly my next interesting trip is now only 6 weeks away. I’ll be travelling to Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region of Iraq at the top end of the country that borders Turkey and Iran. Whilst travelling to Iraq may sound like a dangerous ordeal this area of the country has maintained an air of calm to it managing to mostly avoid the Shia/Sunni civil war due to the population consisting mainly of people of Kurdish ethnicity. There has been some ramping up of suicide bombings and conflicts in the Southern part of the country recently but hopefully this will not affect the trip. I’ve been reading a few books on Iraq and would highly recommend the following to anyone interested;

Thames Town – A little England in China

To make the most out of my trip to North Korea I decided to spend about two weeks in China before and after the trip. I pretty much did your standard touristy stuff, not hugely interesting in the context of this blog, but when I was looking into sights around Shanghai I stumbled on something I’d never heard about and knew I had to head there.

In the suburbs of Shanghai is a district called Songjiang. To promote tourism and attract people out of the centre of the city they embarked upon a project called the Songjiang new city, an ambitious plan to create several villages that are representative of different countries around the world. The first to be planned and built was Thames town, a full village packed with numerous styles of architecture from England, and even a few duplicated buildings.

In the style of Chester City centre, along with a chain pub.