First Post

Waiting for my flight back to Fort Lauderdale in the rural and quiet Mobile, Alabama airport, I had the unsettling feeling dawn on me that South Korea is truly a world away from where I was. I began to think of exactly how far I was going to be traversing over the Earth this coming Sunday but the notion of going to the opposite side of Planet Earth was a tough one for me to grasp. Even my research on the net produced measurements whose meaning were lost in their size. From my home base of Ann Arbor, Michigan, I would be flying just shy of 6,800 miles. By comparison, the distance from Ann Arbor to the center of the earth is 6,400 miles. Effectively, the pure distance our group was going to be traveling was a few hundred miles more than the width of the earth. The distance of our trip now had meaning and was toying with the scale of planets.

I next wanted to comprehend how far around the globe we were going to be, relative to Ann Arbor. Using the powerful picture analysis program called Paint, it looked like we were traveling a 1/3rd of the way around the globe. Time wise, that will put us 13 hours ahead of the Mitten. When Michiganders are enjoying a summer evening, we will be eating breakfast and getting ready for another day in the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard. How weird.

Tomorrow, the day before our group meets in Chicago, is going to be the big prep day for traveling abroad. I need to open a National City bank account, buy a digital camera, pay bills for the next month, buy a piece of luggage, set up Skype on my computer, buy an adapter for the Korean power outlets, and get a massage. Or I might just put it off until Saturday morning, and go to the beach instead.

Also, note to self: REMEMBER TO BRING YOUR PASSPORT!