Saying Hello ---again!

Wow! It has been a long time since I posted on this blog!

After arriving home from Vietnam in December, I entered the "I want to go back to Asia" mode. It was surprising how long it took for the wishing and wanting to return to subside. About mid-April a short email appeared in my in-box from the Asian Affairs Center at MU. A university in South Korea was looking for MU professors to teach there this summer. Hmmmmm.... I thought about it for several days and then talked to Phil to see what he thought about the idea. Although he didn't want to go, Phil was supportive and so I sent in my materials and heard back from them that I was accepted! So......tomorrow I leave for Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea. It is located about 150 miles south of Seoul. The city is large with a population of about 1 million....and beyond that, I don't know much about the city or the area. Hopefully I will be able to learn more very, very soon.



I have a late evening flight tomorrow on Asiana Airlines. I am on a flight that leaves Chicago at 1am. My plan is to watch one movie....eat whatever they put in front of me and take an Ambien .... hopefully I will wake up with only a few hours left before arrival. Once I get to Seoul, I then must take a 4 hour bus ride from the airport to Gwangju. The nice thing is that the express bus goes directly from the airport to the city....so hopefully it will be a fairly painless experience. Well...thirty hours door-to-door isn't going to painless!

I will be in South Korea until July 15th....then I will leave for five days in Beijing. I was invited to visit a Chinese geographer working at Peking University and jumped at the opportunity to visit China.

So...a busy couple of months ahead. I will write more about my teaching and my trip once I arrive and get settled. So stay tuned---more to come.