Dr. Gunther von Bergweinstrom goes English.

Dear friends, family and other readers all around the world.

This blog has now changed from Icelandic to English in order for me to reach to a wider audience, especially those who have not yet learnt the amazing Icelandic language :-).

To start with, an introduction might be appropriate.  I am a medical student from Iceland and am situated at this moment in Guatemala, doing an elective in general surgery, at Roosevelt Hospital in Guatemala City, the country's capital.  I have been several times abroad, and hitherto trained in hospitals in Iceland, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and am now starting here in Guatemala.  The current internship/elective is part of a 3 month elective period, half of which will be spent here and the other half in Peru.

I will be using this blog as a future reference for myself, as a record of my foreign outings within medicine, but also to keep track and let non-Icelandic speaking friends know where and what I'm doing, as time does unfortunately not allow e-mails to all those I would like to write.  Most likely I will also be comparing different health-care systems between the countries I know, as well as writing about special cases or just how medical care in general differs to that in Europe.

I already had an introduction at the hospital on the day before Christmas and was received very warmly in the (ever so nicely decorated) department, where I'll be spending my elective.  I knew that I'd be entering a totally different medical world, compared to Europe, but I did not realize how much or in what way the difference would be.  This will become increasingly clear, as I will officially start on the 2nd of January 2014.