Hengshan Park – Places You Might Miss
The French Municipal Council built Hengshan Park in August 1925. During construction, they took 5000 tonnes of mud from XuJiaHui River. They used the mud to fill out the low-lying channel to the north of the park. Afterwards, they built a pavilion on top and planted many arbour trees. In May 1926 they opened the park to foreign visitors only, like many other parks in Shanghai at the time.
Dandong Beer Festival
Last time we were in Dandong we saw an advertisement for the Dandong Beer Festival. We planned to finish our holiday with some excessive beer consumption.
After returning to Dandong we rested up in our hotel for a short while. The we headed over to Peter’s for some food. Over lunch we realised that none of us knew the address to go to the Beer Festival. A frantic search over the wireless internet didn’t turn up anything.
Sino-Korean Border Road Trip
The day after our long detour from Ji’an we set off back to Dandong. We had planned to start driving down the Sino-Korean border from Linjiang. Unfortunately we ended up 90km off course so we would only get to do it from Ji’an.
This is a drive I would recommend anyone. The border is essentially a river going through a mountain range. There are few cities, especially on the Korean side.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Ji’an
We were in Linjiang having just rode a boat along the border. A friend’s uncle had offered to take us out to dinner since he lives in the area. Our plan was to join him for dinner and then go on to Ji’an. I hadn’t eaten that day so I was looking forward to trying out some local cuisine.
This is always a small risk as there’s a good chance I may not like the food on offer.
Linjiang: A Boat Ride Along the Border
The next stop on our tour along the Sino-Korean border was Linjiang. This is another city that lights up like Vegas at night. Only the Chinese built this one across from a small North Korean farming community.
The hotel we stayed in Linjiang was right next to the town square. It was a nice hotel, but nothing too special. There is a small island to the south of the city called Huandao.
Social Links: No need to use plugins
Social media links can help a site gain a following. They can allow people to share pages and follow your social media pages. There are several plugins that can add links for you and they can work quite well. The problem is that these plugins hook your page into a third party application. I wouldn’t have too much trouble with this on its own. These applications seemed quite well put together.
Huanren: A night in a castle
Road Trip
After finishing our DPRK tour, we decided to go on a road trip along the border. We decided to go to Huanren, Linjiang, Ji’an and then come back to Dandong for a beer festival.
We had breakfast in Dandong and sorted ourselves out with a driver. Our tour guide friend had contacts here so he was able to get a good deal for us.
Category Pages
I wanted to split up my content in a neat and tidy way. I realised the easiest way to do this would be to split up my content by category. After trying a few plugins to create pages that displayed a list of posts in a category I realised that I needed to approach this another way.
As it turns out you can do this in WordPress easily by using Menus and Widgets.
Dandong and the Chinese People’s War Museum
The train from Pyongyang took us back to Dandong. The first order of business was to find a hotel.
Settling In
We ended up staying at the last true Communist hotel in China. The staff ran it as a commune, with no one staff member being the manager.
While checking in the North Korean train staff wandered in.
When Plugins Collide
When making a new post one day I came across a bug in my website. I created a new post, attached a featured image, and hit preview. I got a messed up page that had two copies of my featured image above the page content.
As panic set in I went through and checked everything. My site still looked fine. Already published posts seemed okay. Checking previews of already scheduled posts showed that they were fine.