Around the world in 90 minutes…Impossible? No. Astronauts do it all the time. Us normal people? Maybe a little more difficult. Until now. Leave it to the Chinese to figure it out.

In the southwest corner of Beijing, there resides a park dedicated to showing off the world’s greatest structural wonders throughout history. Each section of the park is dedicated to a certain geographic area of the world. Europe. America. Africa. Middle-East. Ancient Egypt. Ancient Greece.

This is one twenty-fifth of the actual size…

Ever want to see a pyramid or the Coliseum but never had the money to travel to Egypt or Rome? Now you can see both and much more up close and personal on a smaller scale. But you need to travel to Beijing first. The White House. Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. The former skyline of New York City complete with Twin Towers. Denmark’s Mermaid. Belgium’s water basin. London Tower Bridge. Venice. Paris. All are there. Some even that I’d never heard of before. Each on a scale varying in size from life-size to as small as one-fourtieth of the actual size. Each, however, much larger than a human. And all seen in 90 minutes. Flat. Well worth the $10 US it cost to get in. And I can now say I’ve been to all the most important places in history throughout the world.

Of course, I was not the only one there. Besides my friends from school, many Chinese congregated around the various parts of the world for pictures. Not just any pictures mind you. Engagement/wedding pictures. Tall, thin, short, stout, all types of Chinese were there dressed to the nines to capture that special moment next to those historical markers. Making history next to history.

Now, we weren’t planning on seeing these artifacts when our journey began. Originally, we were only going to see Marco Polo Bridge. We saw it. It’s historically significant. It was there when Marco Polo visited. It’s that old and still in use. Polo said that that bridge was a marvel. The dragons on top of each of the bridge’s pillars has a different facial expression. But it’s just a bridge. It took all of 10 minutes, if not less, to get what we wanted out of it. So, we did the next best thing: checked the iPhone and found the World’s Park 世界公园.

Traveling is fun. All places have so much good. The world’s greatest monuments will always be preserved by historians, books, pictures and now actual models built to scale. In China.

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