I went home... to Ontario at least - which is home for me, but in a way Pohang has become home too.  I've decided that a person can have more than one home.  There's certainly more to say about this idea of home, but I'll leave it at that for now.
The trip was good.  I got to see all of my family members and spend quality time with them despite it being a short trip.  I'm returning to Pohang with the fresh reminder that I am loved - what more could you want from a trip home.
But in this blog I want to tell you about two experiences I had in airports while travelling.  First of all, I really like airports, and always have.  It has been said that you can learn a lot about someone just by looking at them.  In an airport, you can look at a whole host of different people.  That's why I like airports.
The first experience happened on my way to Canada, in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.  I had some time to walk around the airport and pretty quickly I started to recognize that I had been there before.  I thought about it and remembered that I had been to this airport with a group of Calvin students on our way to Belize for a January interim class in 2007.  That was an awesome trip with awesome people and I remember distinctly where our group had sat down in the airport to wait for our flight.   Remembering this trip is always fun for me and being in a place where our group had once been made it even cooler.  I couldn't help but march over to the place where our group had sat over four years ago, half expecting some of our group members to still be sitting there waiting, just like we had been.  Isn't it interesting how we associate memory with place.
The second experience came on my trip back to Korea, in the Chicago O'Hare airport.  As I was walking to the food court to buy something to eat, I passed a woman sitting at a table skyping with someone on her ipad, right in the middle of a busy airport.  This probably shouldn't have been such a surprising experience for me, given the age that we live in, but it was.  The ability to see and talk in present time to a person who is somewhere completely different has always astounded me somewhat, and this woman was doing it with a 20-by-15cm, hand-held slab of plastic, glass and wires!  What's more is that, in complete contrast to this experience, I am still reading essays by Wendell Berry in What Are People For? and in one of his essays, which I read on this trip, he writes about why he doesn't own a computer.  To be true, Berry wrote this essay in 1987 (I wonder if he still doesn't own a computer), but I appreciate his argument against the continuing 'advancement' of technology none the less.  It makes me wonder if having the ability to see and talk to someone almost anywhere at almost any time is actually progress.  Do iphones, ipads, Kindles, and, essentially, computers make us into better people?  I realize that these questions open up a big can of worms, but I think our society needs to open this can and to ask those worms these sorts of questions.  If you have any knowledge on the topic let me know.

Thanks for reading,
Michael