Happy NY

I am in New York. I am interviewing for emergency medicine residency programs. It is awesome and only slightly overwhelming.

When I am not touring emergency departmets in my espresso brown pantsuit, I am staying in Brooklyn at the apartment of my very nice friend Marisa and cat-sitting for her across the street neighbors. It is a wonderful arrangement that i gave thanks for yesterday at the Mexican Thanksgiving feast that I was graciously invited to, sitting around the large table with people from all over the world. Marisa and I made an enormous vat of guacamole and brought fixings for dark n' stormies.

I have been doing a lot of classic NY walking and sightseeing. Brooklyn bridge - check. Soho- check. Canal Street - check. Central Park - check. After a lovely walk in Central Park on tuesday, I found myself standing next to the Natural History Museum as they were blowing up the floats to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Sponge Bob smushed his face to the street, the body of Ronald McDonald lay splayed out flat like a cheery police tracing, the Energizer Bunny sat forlornly caved in on himself. All these enormous crumpled cartoon icons puddled in the streets of New York.

Fun New York fact: There is no trauma here. The violent crime rate has gone down so much that emergency medicine residents at NY hospitals are not getting enough experience dealing with trauma (gunshots, stabbings, etc). They have to do rotations out of the city to get properly trained, in Las Vegas and Miami, for example. Who knew? This renders ineffective all my jokes about getting "knifed" on the subway the minute I arrived.

Happy Thanksgiving.