Trip to Korea and Japan - Day 0: The big picture

(Click for all trips here.)
I am currently, in parallell with working as an upper secondary school teacher in mathematics and geography (and computer science, but that was some years ago I actually had any of those courses), doing the first half of a PhD at Uppsala University. To sum it up shortly, the theisi is formally done in Geography, but what I am doing is using my background in math and programming to analyze infrared photographs taken of rock surfaces and rock art on these surfaces to see if the sun and heat in general has any effect on them.
As part of that I have been doing measurements in Sweden and in South Africa (and some in Namibia). That could have been enough, but I got a scholarship from SSAG (who in their time has sponsored the first expedition to pass the Northeast passage and the tragic Andrée Balloon Expedition) to extend my data from sites in Ulsan, Korea and Hokkaido, Japan, which is very exiting for me personally.

Roughly my itinerary looks like this:
Thursday 18th - Friday 19th: Travel from Arlanda (Sweden) via Doha (Qatar) and Seoul (Korea) to Ulsan (Korea).
Saturday 20th - Wednesday 24th: Measurements in Ulsan. The measurements themselves will probably be only for a day, but the weather is an important factor that with its randomness creates the need for margins.
Thursday 25th: Travel to Sapporo (Japan) via Seoul.
Friday 26th - Sunday 4th/Monday 5th: Measurements in Fugoppe and Temiya caves at sites outside Sapporo. As above, conditions creates the need for spare days, and also in this case, to allow extra time to handle access to the, in this case, protected caves. This is at the moment looking good as I have gotten some genereous assistance from people in Japan already.
Monday 5th - Monday 12th: Time in Tokyo before returning home. Initial sorting and pre-analysis of data.
Thuesday 13th: Flight from Tokyo via Moscow (Russia) to Arlanda.

All in all 27 days abroad. I will miss my children sorely, but I know they will be reading my blog, and also getting to go to Spain for 10 days, so hopefully we will all manage. It will be a memorable trip anyways, and hopefully I will be able to honor the chance I got from SSAG well. I will be writing about my trip each day (if I can) and I will try to tell of some of the things I encounter, be they trivial or not.

Day 1 is here.