In May 2019, our team traveled to China to meet customers, learn more, ask questions and absorb the atmosphere. All in all, the trip turned out to be very successful. Below you can have a glimpse at what we got up to.
Our first stop was Shanghai, where we spent two days. After a night on the plane with no sleep we enjoyed our first day in China by visiting our office at FinChi. We enjoyed a good luch with Zoe and Joan from the FinChi team and Lukia from OPH (Finnish National Agency for Education). Among other delicacies, we got to taste frog legs.
The following day we had more meetings, and we met a wonderful lady, Ms. Tori.
Our next stop was Suzhou, where we met the wonderful Ms. Ingrid and Ms. Tina and visited their Nordic Treehouse kindergarten.
We also visited a shopping mall with various after school centers such as Little Gym, which our Finnish children immediately wanted to visit after seeing the pictures.
Our next stop was Nanjing and Saint Maria Kindergarten. This was one of the most exciting meetings as we had waited for it a long time. The lovely people at Saint Maria welcomed us warmly by greeting the CEO with a light screen.
We also met friends from Finland and shared a lovely dinner together by the Jianxi river with a breath-taking view.
It was such a great honor to meet the very elegant and wise Ms. Tang and the very smart and warmhearted Ms. Tamara among other wonderful people.
Next, we traveled to Beijing. We had an honor to be invited to organize a seminar at the Finnish Ambassador’s residence where we had over 20 participants. Counsellor Mari-Anna Suurmunne kindly gave a key note speech about us and Finnish education before we started. The seminar was highly successful and we look forward to continuing the wonderful discussions.
On our last night we enjoyed the famous Beijing Duck. This one was a modern version which we really loved!
We are soon heading back to China, and we are eager to learn more about the culture and local education but also the language. One should always have a set of local survival vocabulary just in case something goes wrong. This is the ‘Survival Chinese’ that we learned during our trip:
Nĭ hăo. Pí jiǔ. Hànbǎobāo. Xièxiè. Hěn hǎo. Bǎole. Fāpiào. Xièxiè. Zàijiàn.
Translation: “Hello. Beer. Hamburger. Thank you. Very delicious. I’m full. Check. Thank you. Goodbye.” We think this is a good start, and we look forward to learning much more in the future.