Getting Started

We are busy preparing for our trip to South Korea. We have purchased the airline tickets and travel insurance. Our visas have been approved and our out-of-state travel has been approved by SDSU. Last week we sent some textbooks for class by mail and we are busy preparing ourselves for the trip (buying extra medicine and other items we may not find in Korea). Our plane flight is on March 8 at 6 am and we arrive in Seoul on March 9 at 7:15 pm. Mary has been busy setting up visiting schedules for family for her mother while we are gone and Doug has been teaching his classes at South Dakota State University (SDSU) in an accelerated fashion so we can leave and have the class commitments at SDSU done by March 5. The semester at Chungnam National University (CNU) starts during the first week in March so we will arrive just a little late but we will catch up. We are excited about our upcoming trip and Mary has been meeting with a retired Korean SDSU faculty member to learn a little more about the Korean culture. Doug taught at CNU in 1998 so it will be interesting to see how things have changed at CNU and in Korea since that time. One of the items that Doug had made for this trip are business cards with English information on one-side and Korean information on the other. Also, we have a new guest living with us, Anna Newhouse, Mary's niece. She will be living in our home while we are away. She recently started a new full-time job in Brookings.

The last two weeks have seen lots of snow added to an already snowy winter so now our snow piles are getting so high between our homes that we cannot see our cars because the snow piles and drifts are so high. We have even got the metal chop sticks out and are beginning to use them regularly at meal time.