I would really love to keep this blog, if its only for myself. So I'll start by giving a short summary of what happened since May 2008:
- I completed my clinical rotation in Louisville, Kentucky. There are a few posts at another (german) blog about the great time I had there.
- We then moved to a nice apartment in Mannheim for 8 months, having had enough of Heidelberg and being short of money..., then moved again to an even nicer apartment a few hundred meters away which I already feel sorry to give up...
- I studied quite a bit from July-October and on till December, when I finally graduated; after I had gotten into the habit I kept studying and passed USMLE Step2 CK and CS by January 2009.
- In February, I got my first job in a nice hospital not too far away and worked there for a year. I have lots of good memories from that time,
- we also had a great vacation in summer with my soon-to-be-inlaws (at the time) and a nice little trip to Budapest in February, but I still wanted to make use of that USMLE thing,
- So I took part in the Match 2010 and earned a position in New York... This was really lucky, I presume, given the fact that everything hadn't worked out perfect in the beginning (it was a last-minute thing as usual and had it not been for S.W. kicking me to hurry up when we met in Mannheim at the end of September, when I hadn't applied to a single program yet, I wouldn't have matched at all).
- Right after that, my wife and I went to China to celebrate our wedding. It was great to have that many friends and relatives come all the way to China and I think everyone had a lot of fun. After the wedding, we organized two trips, first with the majority of our German guests, then another one just with our parents and my 89 year-old grandfather.
- We actually went to the city where he could have been born in 1920, had his father not been kept from going to China as a missionary physician by the outbreak of WW I in 1914... My great-grandfather had already sort of signed a contract to become the successor of a German physician who had founded the first hospital at that place in 1896. Here are two pictures taken about 110 years apart:
- Since returning to Germany, my wife has been busy studying for her final exams. She already completed two of them, but there are three more to survive...
- Contrary to this, I have been rather lazy myself since we returned about a month ago (I had not renewed my contract after it expired on February 15th in order to have enough time for all the wedding preparations etc.). It is quite impressive to experience firsthand the corrupting forces of our welfare state. I don't usually think of myself as a lazy person prone to waste his time playing Wii and gaining weight, depending on the state to pay for his livelihood (at least not more than the average person... I used to be addicted to CIV I + II). But I have to admit that I've come pretty close to this. And I must state here that I consider the 1700 Euros I get every month for doing *nothing* pretty much crazy. How did this system work for so long, anyway? I really don't want to be seen as the ungrateful parasite that I might seem to be for some (getting a free education, then leaving the country after "siphoning off" 6000 Euros in unemployment benefits). It just maddens me to think how great a country Germany could be if it actually manages to be such a decent place while wasting so much money in its health care and welfare sectors. I think I can invest that money better than my state, and by "invest" I don't mean buying a Porsche. We could have used a fast car, though,
- as today we had to cover 350KM by train twice to go to Munich for our US visa interview. What initially appeared as a stressful task (and indeed very much lived up to our worst expectations when the embassy staff told us that my wife's online application form (estimated burden according to travel.state.gov: 75 minutes) had somehow been lost in their system and we had to go back to the main station, find an internet cafe, fill it out once more and be back in a little over an hour... we did get our visas, though) ended up being a great trip that "climaxed" in a quiet hour at the Hofbräuhaus-Biergarten, where we were able to catch a few rare rays of sun and cherish what people everywhere in the world hold to be typical German food: Schweinshaxe + 1 Mass Bier. I've only had it three times in my life, each time at the Hofbräuhaus, but I will miss it...
- Of course, the subject of the last post two years ago should not be forgotten, especially since it seems that many deaths could have been avoided if building codes would have been enforced, especially in schools. What is most sickening is that people are kept from exposing those who are responsible on the local and provincial level. Although I am no expert to judge, I did like what Ai Weiwei did in Munich. At least he seems to be concerned about the victims.
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