A carefully thought out, meticulously detailed itinerary of our upcoming trip.

It's to China.

Ok, so maybe we don't technically have the whole trip mapped out like a "responsible" group of "adults," but we do have a few things settled. For example, we know what country we'll be visiting: China. We also know where we would like to be at the end of the trip: South Korea.

In all fairness we have the beginning (leaving South Korea on the 5th via the Incheon-Quindao ferry) and end (return via the 4:30pm Korean Air flight from Hong Kong on February 23rd) set up already. It's just the middle bit between there that's still up for grabs. We're thinking about spending about 5 days in Beijing, and a few days in Xi'an and Hong Kong, leaving eight or so days without definite plans.

The problem with those empty days is in choosing between all the stuff there is to do. I remember one of my professors (Alan Holiman, I think) telling me the story of an English friend of his who, in planning a weeklong trip to the USA, thought he would have time to rent a car and drive to New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Kansas City, and the Grand Canyon. We have a similar problem. We'd love to see the Three Gorges Dam, raft on the Yang Zhe river, feed pandas in Sichuan, hike and go spelunking in Hunan, and see the Portugese influence in Macau and French influence in Shanghai, but there's just not enough time to get everywhere. We have a couple of tentative schedules, but we'll have to see which fits best with the train and bus routes. Fortunately, we can check those online before we actually arrive in China, so look for a more defined itinerary in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, Korea is in the middle of celebrating the Lunar New Year (설날 "Seolal"). This is the biggest holiday of the year. During Seolal which began on Saturday and ends Tuesday night, most businesses shut down and pretty much everyone able to travel goes to his hometown to spend the holiday with family. Becky, Cory and I will be travelling to the province just to the North (aptly named "Northern Jeolla Province") of ours to spend the last day of Seolal with Becky's co-teacher, Kim Ok Jin and her friends and family. I'll let you know how that goes.

Ok, I expected this to be a bit longer, but as it's just about 3:00am here, I'll just leave it at that and go to bed. G'night!

P.S. We like to hear how you guys are doing too, so send us e-mails, facebook messages or comments with something a bit more substantial than "Dood, wut up?" mmmk?