World Appreciative Inquiry Conference

It’s about 10,000 miles or 23 hours or 12 in-flight movies from Melbourne to Ghent, Belgium. That’s many miles and hours we endured to attend the fifth World Appreciative Inquiry conference.

We have just got back from this memorable trip and here are just a few of the highlights:

• Catching up with friends from the US, the UK, Belgium, Nepal – and many other parts of the world.
• Making new friends – the AI mob are a great crowd!
• Wonderful hospitality from Linda Wante and her son Sebastiaan. We stayed at her home and it felt like being at home.
• Providing the early morning Tai Chi sessions – though I won’t miss those 5.00am starts! I had to catch the early bus to get there by 7.30am.
• Helping out with the photography for the conference.
• The Number 9 bus. We managed somehow to catch it going the wrong way one evening, so took more than an hour to get ‘home’ to Linda’s place. Not that we were too worried – we saw more of Ghent and its night life on the way!
• Belgian waffles! Yum!
• Exploring the beautiful historical sites of Ghent and Bruges.
• Being interviewed on WAIC Radio and by some secondary school students for a school project.
• Singing the Australian national anthem on the WAIC Radio with a group of Aussies.  Unfortunately for the listeners, I had to ‘sing’ … and yes, as I know a number of other Aussies will sympathise, I had to read the lyrics. :)
• The wonderful boat ride on the second day of the conference – a leisurely tour of Ghent on our way to the conference ‘party’.
• Our Party Night  – and the great band led by Sarah Ferri.
• A night out with our friends from Nepal, eating at Nepalese restaurant in Ghent.

There are lots more … I could add a whole string of ‘etc’s at the end of that list!

The whole experience of going to Belgium and attending the conference was superb. The kind of experience people often describe as ‘once in a lifetime’.

But that’s not how Sue and I would describe it.

After all, we definitely want to go back to Belgium and visit our friends there again one day.

And we’re already talking about saving our pennies so we can get to the next World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in South Africa in 2015!