Beijing Subway - Fangshan Line: the World Park and a cool pagoda

The Beijing metro system opened five new lines for the beginning of this year, which meant five new areas to explore!  The one that caught our interest the most was the Fangshan Line.  Not only is it fairly far out, it is also currently unconnected to the rest of the subway network, meaning the area must be reasonably populated and active!  We looked over the area on Google Maps and decided that one of the Liangxiang University stations would probably be the most interesting.

We started out at the top of the line, with our long-awaited visit to the World Park.  We’d heard that it was a big park full of scale models of world monuments, so how could we not go!  It ended up being a lot of fun, and even better than expected.  They had the classics: the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, Big Ben, and so on. 

There were also some unexpected sites, such as a full-size model of the Trojan Horse. 

In the Asia area they had a full-size model of the Great Wall, which we found odd since one could get to the real Great Wall by going an hour north of the city rather than an hour south.

After we’d seen all there was to see at the World Park we went across the street from the entrance to try out a Lanzhou noodles place we’d spotted.  It was amazing!  Lanzhou noodles is always a good bet, but this place was really something special.  If only it wasn’t so far away from where we live!

Then, onto the Fangshan Line itself.  First we rode it all the way out to the end, and it was impressively populated all along!  Then we went back to Liang Xiang University West Station, the one that had looked the best, and it didn’t disappoint!  After walking a ways north from the station we spotted a pagoda in the distance—an excellent thing to explore.  The roads were a little tricky, but it was actually much closer than it had initially appeared!  In front there was an odd little park (Haotian Park), with lots of little, disused playground areas and a big bull grazing amongst them.  Unfortunately the pagoda was closed so we couldn’t get inside, but it was still very cool.

The area around it had a big bell with a ringer, which was very fun.

There were also fairly extensive trails in the woods around there.  It’s amazing what you can find just out off the subway lines!