Hi Everyone! As a guest on today’s episode, we have my dad here who will be sharing his experience of what it is like to live and work in Alaska. I had a lot of fun hearing his answers, some of them were even new to me, so I hope you learn a lot from this and have as much fun listening to it as we did making it.

Before we begin, I’d like to give a brief background of the state. Alaska was the 49th state admitted to the United States on January 3, 1959. The state borders British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada and sits right next to the Bering Strait, which divides it from Russia. In fact, Alaska was purchased from Russia for 7.2 million dollars in 1867, which was a great deal, especially because gold was discovered there in the 1890s and oil in the late 1960s. I talked in detail about the Exxon Valdez oil spill there in episode number 24, if you’d like to check that out. 

One thing that you may not know about Alaska is how massive it is. Just this one state is bigger than the 22 smallest states in the US together, and it’s larger than the three largest U.S. states – so California, Montana and Texas – combined. That is if you count its territorial waters.