The 5th FK China Network meeting

Last weekend (25th-27th of April) we attended FK China's network meeting in Kunming, a beautiful city in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. Saturday we had a social trip that involved former and new network members, and Sunday we had meetings where both FK partners and participants attended.

On Saturday we visited Jiu Xiang – some awesome caves south west of Kunming. These caves are on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The caves had underground rivers and waterfalls and the walk through them was fascinating.

After that we visited Shi Lin (The Stone Forest). In addition to enjoying the scenery all the participants had a meeting where we talked about what we had been working on since the last FK meeting in Beijing.

On Sunday we had meetings and discussions with all the partners. It was nice to meet the people we met on the last meeting, and to meet new participants and partners.

We had a great weekend in Yunnan. When we came Friday we visited a café that had western food, and we decided to try it. The pizza was good, but we especially liked the menu they had there.

Yunnan is known for its many minority groups, and beautiful clothing. These nicely dressed women we encountered at Jiu Xiang. We also saw people walking in Kunming city with colourful dresses.

It was a very interesting city, and the surroundings, with red iron-rich soil, rice patties, and water buffaloes was quite different from what we are used to from the northern part of China. Getting to know other FK people and exploring different areas of China are things we really will miss when we leave for home within a month.

The networks homepage;

http://www.fkchinanetwork.org

FK Network Meeting in Beijing

Last Saturday we went to Beijing on the night train. 19 hours and hard sleepers again, but it's always fun so we didn't mind much. We travelled through the desert lands of Inner Mongolia, through Shanxi and Hebei, saw a lot of beautiful scenery, until we finally arrived at Beijing Railway station.

In Beijing we had two free days before the show (network meeting) started. We decided to be crazy tourists and went to the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Jade Factory, Tea House, Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Beihai Park and Jingshan Park. All this in just two days. Imagine how tired we were of all the walking. Especially the day we ran to the top of the Wall. But it was definitely worth it. We got to see a lot of China in two days, and had a lot of fun.

But after the fun started the work. The reason for travelling to Beijing was that we were to attend an FK Network Meeting for FK China. It lasted for one and a half day, but it turned out that it wasn't half bad after all. We discussed and shared experiences and from the looks of it it was rather successful. One of the best, some people said. So with a satisfied smile on our faces we flew back to Yinchuan on Thursday to plan Friday's teaching. It was a hasty but fun week in Beijing. Looking forward to going back there some day.

Link to Fredskorpset's coverage of the meeting (in Norwegian):
http://www.fredskorpset.no/no/Fredskorpset/Media/NyheterPressemeldinger/Nettverksmote-i-Beijing/