Kentucky

Since April 5th, I am doing a 3-month clinical rotation in Louisville, Kentucky. Everything has worked very well for me, but unfortunately, I lost my laptop at the airport. At least this is a good excuse for not posting for another week...
Short summary: I like Louisville, people are really nice, my apartment is situated in a surprisingly nice part of town. Of course, I am impressed with how doctors work here (no blood drawing and much less paper work; even echocardiograms are performed by technicians, not doctors). And it is comforting for me as a foreigner that there are so many other people from around the world.

Thinking about different approaches to immigration in Germany and the US or Britain, I recently found this gallup report, which really left me mulling over Germany's future. The German government recently annonunced that they would postpone the opening of its labour market (to the EU's new members only) until 2011 - perpetuating the world's worst immigration policy. It really saddens me - there are two big parties in Germany and BOTH seem to agree on this. In the US, there is no shortness of cheap populism either, but many aspects of their policy seem more realistic to me...