differences...

I guess this will be own journal for myself too, but here goes.

It's been really nice there thus far. It makes me apprecriative of the differences, however subtle or varied, they are of the two cultures. For those who are unaware, I'm spending the month of February in Guangzhou, Guangdong Provience, China for clinical rotations. I'll have to continue to thank my residency program for sponsoring me here. For starters, I happened to arrive during the New Year's. Chinese New Year is a full week long celebration and people seem really surprised that the U.S. only gets 1-2 days off for their Christmas/New Years. In general, everything stops. The construction zone that is the city halts since everyone goes back to the country side. In the hospital, even the patients that can go home do so, as long as they aren't hooked to an IV for anything. The hospital runs on a partial staff too. Once the week is over, things kick back to full gear. They follow traditions a lot and like many Asians, tend to be a bit too superstitious. The class distinction between elders both by age and job role is more marked as well. Everyone also tends to welcome guests a lot more than in the U.S.

Every day, both here abroad and in the U.S., I try to pay attention to something cool. What's cool to me is different than someone else, but for me, sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's an "ah-ha" moment and makes me more apprecriative of life and nature. Typically you can't quantify it and I hope that it's something can never be programmed into a computer code. Anyway, today I was walking around and heard John Mayer, except that on following it, it was being sung, not too shabby, by a Chinese kid. There are a lot of street performers around, he definitely stood out. I'm not sure how many others around knew what to make of him though. Guangzhou does not have a lot of non-Chinese visitors compared to other cities in China. I listened for a bit and gave him to what amounted to about 1 US dollar.

this is a note to myself, but I'm supposed to spend a little time in the hospital tomorrow, so I'll post about that next.