I feel like I'm living in opposite land

...well at least when it comes to the medical side of things. Here are my five solid reasons why:
1. Everyone here is mandated to work no more than 37 hours per week. Everyone. That includes clerks and residents. As a result, though they do have overnight call shifts that last 24 hours, that means they can only work, you guessed it: 37-24=13 hours for the rest of the week.
2. The resident I spoke with was actually envious of our system, and wanted to work more. His reasons: you'd get a lot more experience with everything, and become competent much faster, if you worked the number of hours we did.
3. General practitioners make significantly more money than specialists in hospitals.
4. The work of general practitioners is considered more difficult.
5. Although the public system predominates, the private system is actually being subsidized by the government right now, because it's not doing as well as the publicly-run system.

Continuing in the medical scheme of things, I saw a transposition surgery today (switch the aorta with the pulmonary artery); the patient also had several septal defects corrected. She was 9 days old. Crazy. Apparently they only get something like 10 cases like this per year.
Oh, another random medical thing was when this one guy comes up to me and starts chatting me up about the American system. He seemed to be of the opinion himself that despite the fact that he could make way more money there, had no interest in going to the States because of their 'social problems', which he especially didn't want to expose his kids to. Haha.

Hey, there's a new feature in blogger that apparently saves your drafts as you're typing them. This comes in especially useful when the cat bats at the mouse and manages to close down the browser you're using to type stuff up in. How nice.

Did more of the walking tour thing today, and ended up in a museum for a bit. Apparently, Denmark has a relatively peaceful history. I found it funny describing a siege by British warships, which they enumerate in detail, as well as the plan of the British, which was essentially to steal all of Denmark's navy. The next line begins 'after Copenhagen's capitualtion, the British went on to...'. Guess they didn't see the point in fighting.

Communication with the dude in charge of our placement (herein referred to as the 'handler') has not been super-fantastic. He posted our names, as well as who we were paired with, in Danish, as well as our objectives for the elective. I found this out after the resident dude I was following around showed it to me, and translated the contents. I still haven't been introduced to the doctor I'm supposed paired up with. On the sunny side of things, the set-up other than that seems pretty sweet. Show up in the morning, find out what's going on that day, then pick whatever sounds the most interesting and do it. No other students around (holidays) so Osvaldo and I pretty much have the run of the department.

Ran across a bar in the sex district called the 'spunk bar'. Had to take a picture of it. While there, I asked a random Danish dude walking by what 'spunk' meant in Danish; he answered 'it's a type of candy'. He then started turning bright red. Don't know if asking him right next to his (presumed) girlfriend was such a good idea, but I think he could've come up with a better lie. I mean seriously, who eats candy at a bar? Also, the Danish word for stop is 'slut'. Figured this out after a while of pondering why so many operations on sluts ended so abruptly.

Also trying to figure out if I want to go to Stockholm or Oslo this weekend. I thought it'd be nice to check out the viking ship museum in Oslo.

Next post will either be more hilarious or have better visuals. I can almost promise.