A Southerner in South Sweden

I know I keep saying this, but for someone whose international travel experience is mainly in China, it's really easy to become mesmerized by Europe. That sounds almost counter intuitive, because some would argue that the culture in Europe is so similar to the U.S.

Here's what I mean, though. China's a vast country, almost a continent in its own right, just like the United States. I've traversed it from east to west, examining all kinds of cultures in interior provinces and border regions. But no matter how exotic the locale or how many miles I travel, I'm always in the same country.

Contrast that with Europe, where nations rub elbows with each other. Especially with the EU's paper-thin borders, you can cross with hardly any indication that you've left one country and entered another.

That was my feeling when my Sweden-bound train crossed the Oresund, the strait that separates Sweden and Denmark. Since a bridge linked the two sides about a decade ago, the southern region of Sweden, called Skane, has become tied to Copenhagen's metropolitan area. It makes sense economically, considering the fact that Stockholm is six or seven hours away by train or car.

A Day in Malmo

My first stop was the capital of Skane, a city called Malmo. It has a quarter-million people and lies right on the Oresund. My host, whom I had just contacted on Skype that Sunday morning, would meet me at the Malmo South station. From Copenhagen's center, it was only 15-20 minutes away.

Nils Eric Svensson, an economic development official with quite possibly the most Scandinavian name ever, stood with the hint of a smile on his face as I disembarked. A tall man with piercing blue eyes and some of the biggest hands you've ever seen, I had met him at our office in Georgia over a year ago. We didn't realize it until we finally saw each other. He helped me stuff my bags into his Volvo wagon, which along with the Saab wagon could compete for the title of Sweden's flagship vehicle.

He took me on a driving tour of Malmo. If Nils could be believed, the city was being transformed by an emphasis on the knowledge economy, logistics and environmental technologies. We passed a huge new IKEA facility, a new subway tunnel under construction and a 50,000-seat sports arena on our way to downtown.

As we drove, Nils gave me an abridged look at Malmo's nearly 1,000-year history. The city was established in the 1100s, when what is now southern Sweden was a part of the Danish kingdom. Malmo was originally called "Elbow" because of the shape of the nearby harbor. It has a long maritime history that led to its ascension as a shipbuilding center with a thriving wharf industry earlier in the 20th century. When the construction of ships moved largely to places like South Korea, some of Malmo's large wharfs closed down, leaving thousands jobless and the city with an identity crisis. For Malmo, it was a fork in the road, and from the tale that Nils was spinning, the city chose the right direction. "I've been working in and close to this area for all my time, but I have never experienced a development like we have now," he said.

Many of the wharf buildings, steel factories and old buildings now house companies that make devices for steering ships, clean technology applications, animation for mobile phones and other products that represent an about-face from the city's industrial history. As if to cap the transition, in 2001 construction began on the Turning Torso, a lonely 55-story skyscraper with a unique twisting design. It towers over the harbor and the shorter buildings around it. The Torso replaced the huge Kockums crane that stood as the city's iconic structure in the harbor during the wharf days. On a clear day Nils said it could be seen from 100 kilometers away. Along with the jobs, it too was shipped to South Korea in 2002, symbolizing a clean break with the past.

Where Are They Hiding?

If Malmo had 250,000 people, I wondered where they were hiding. It was a cool, overcast, blustery Sunday, so I assumed many people might be at church or staying indoors. The city was quiet with no semblance of hustle or bustle. Over lunch, Nils said the lack of activity had more to do with the season than religious fervor. In a land dotted with centuries-old churches and universities, not many people make a weekly habit of attending services, he said. It was the beginning of April, and everyone was waiting for the weather to fully change. Then they'd be out in force, walking along the water and taking advantage of the shift from harsh winter to temperate spring.

After lunch in Malmo, Nils drove me up to Lund, an old town with a huge university with a strong research sector that has attracted many high-tech companies. On the way, the green landscape impressed me. We were close to a relatively large city, but the four-lane highway still felt remote. Unlike in America, Sweden doesn't allow billboards to dot every piece of pasture land along the side of the road. We occasionally passed giant, white wind turbines.

Nils said that Malmo residents joke that their Danish friends on the other side of the Oresund strait never get any sunsets because they're facing east. After lunch, Nils and I had about five more hours until darkness fell. I didn't want to take too much of his time, so we went to his downtown office to conduct a video interview I'd put on my company's Web site.

I was talking to him about his region's plans for the upcoming Swedish Entrepreneurial Days conference in Savannah. Tragically, two weeks later, Nils was killed when a truck hit him while he was crossing a street in Savannah. The day before his death, Nils told me at the conference that he was enjoying a sort of vacation in Georgia's oldest city. It was his fifth visit. There was no way of knowing that my interview with him in Malmo would be his last media appearance.

I left Malmo with a deep respect for Nils, enriched by his Swedish brand of Southern Hospitality. With no real benefit for himself, he had taken three hours out of his day off to show a nosey reporter around his city. For me, he turned what could've been a wasted day into an opportunity.

On to Vaxjo

Nils dropped me off a Malmo's train station, a beautiful old brick building that looked and felt similar to the one in Copenhagen. An army of bicycles were parked outside, and gulls fluttered around the structure, which stood in stark red contrast to the bright blue sky. Nils told me Danish architecture had inspired many of the structures in Malmo, and the town hall proved him right. It was situated on a square and looked like a smaller model of the one in Copenhagen.

It only took about 20 minutes for my train to arrive. I boarded and sat down facing east, the direction I would ride for two hours before reaching my next destination.

Vaxjo has branded itself as the "greenest city in Europe." The city takes pride in its quest to totally eliminate CO2 emissions, an effort it began in the mid-1990s. At least according to government leaders, its environmental focus really started long before that, when city officials decided in the late 1960s to clean up its polluted lakes.

While Vaxjo has failed to meet its ambitious CO2 reduction goals, it has reduced emissions by more than 30 percent since the early 1990s. The key to that has been the use of renewable energy sources to provide more than 90 percent of the heating energy. Like Georgia, Sweden has a wealth of forestry resources that it's trying to monetize further as nations form new policies toward green energy.

If you like nightlife, Vaxjo is probably not your place. Maybe it's just Sundays, but when I stepped out of my hotel at 9 p.m., there were very few downtown establishments open. I tried to resist being a fat American, but the choices for dinner were limited to a McDonald's and a questionable pizza place. I went with the tried-and-true golden arches and then retired to the hotel.

The next day was a flash of green. A Vaxjo university professor picked me up at the hotel and drove me around for awhile, showing me the advances the city has made in building environmentally friendly apartments and houses made almost entirely from timber that boasts elevated insulation capabilities that reduce the need for heating in winter.

We then went to the school and did video interviews about possible collaboration between Vaxjo University and the Savannah College of Art & Design. A publisher of an environmental magazine came in to talk to me about partnering with our international business news Web site. I then visited a company that makes kits to transform gas-powered cars into flex-fuel vehicles. Finally, I went to city hall, where Vaxjo's executive mayor laid out reason that his city has become so green-conscious: To create jobs, boost quality of life, and help Vaxjo make its name known on the international stage.

Vaxjo is more than just green energy, though. There'll soon be a glass museum showing off the city's history as a glass/crystal capital. There are great shops, a museum dedicated to the Swedish mass migration to America, and of course, some old churches and buildings. Not to mention that I was now in Smaland, the birthplace of Ingvar Kamprad's IKEA, the furniture giant that has swept the world.

I ate a quick dinner and headed back to the train station. My two-day whirlwind tour of southern Sweden was over almost as soon as it had begun. It was two hours back to the Danish capital. I grabbed a scarce room at a hotel near the Copenhagen central station. My first European tour ended the next day.

Photos - Doors of Denmark

Denmark is the door to Scandinavia from the European continent. Here's a sampling of the doors that grace historical buildings around Copenhagen:







The gate to Tivoli. It was closed for renovations on the day I was there.The door to the country at Kastrup Airport.

24 Hours in Copenhagen

I didn't have long to make my mark on Denmark, so I started early. My flight landed in Copenhagen, the capital, around 10 a.m. I was still a little tired from getting to Charles de Gaulle airport at just after 6 to catch my early flight from Paris.

I read the Wall Street Journal (in a very airplane-friendly tabloid format) for most of the two-hour flight, but I looked out the window in time to see wind turbines standing starkly in the Copenhagen harbor, their crisp white contrasting with the blue of the sea. I wasn't even on the ground, and the city was already starting to live up to its reputation as a hub for alternative energy.

Denmark was not my destination. It was merely a way point, a place to pass through en route to Sweden, but I was excited. There was no way I was going to let a new country go to waste.

Lakes were everywhere reflecting the light of the late morning, and the land was awash in green and blue. Touchdown was smooth. Kastrup Airport was nice, clean and very modern. The first sign that greeted me when I exited the terminal said "Wi-fi Zone." This validated something else I had heard, that Denmark is one of the most wired countries in the world and one of the top places for information technology.

I didn't have to wait long to try out the country's IT infrastructure. After grabbing my bags, I walked to an electronic kiosk to book a train ticket into the city.

Luckily the instructions were in English as well as Danish. A British lady was struggling with the machine when I came up. I tried it out and had no problem until I entered my credit card. The transaction looked like it was going to clear until the screen asked for a PIN. I had never used a PIN with that credit card in the U.S., but the machine would not be reasoned with. I used my debit card instead and felt lucky that I had brought it with me. This wasn't the last time the PIN problem would crop up.

I had no problem finding the right train. It wasn't too crowded when I hopped on. No one made eye contact. A short American guy was making out with his tall, blonde Scandinavian girlfriend the whole way to the central station, Kobenhavn H. My giant red suitcase impeded movement; otherwise I would've turned away. Their public affection displays made me a part sick, part homesick. I'd been away from my wife for a week, the longest time we'd been apart since we married nearly two years ago.

The central station is a large brick building just across a street called Bernsdorffsgade from the famous Tivoli Gardens. It had a McDonald's and other restaurants and shops, but like the airport, the train station was a bit more quaint than you'd expect from a capital city. Of course, Denmark only has 5.4 million people and Copenhagen less than half that, so the whole place, while undoubtedly cosmopolitan and far from sleepy, has a refreshingly laid-back feel.

Come to think of it, while Paris has the (some say) ghastly 59-floor Montparnasse Tower as its lonely modern skyscraper, I couldn't find one in the Danish capital. That's not to say it's not a modern city, but it is free what some would call tall architectural sins that most shiny new western metropolises have committed in the name of progress and population density.

I took a left out of the train station's main entrance and traced Tivoli's eastern edge. An information sign led me to a tourist center on the corner of Bernsdorffsgade and Vesterbrogade, where I nabbed a map. I'd booked my hotel the night before but hadn't bothered to get directions, partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I knew finding it would force me to be resourceful. (Of course, it's hard to be adventurous for long when you're rolling a 45-lb. piece of luggage over cobblestone streets.)

The map led me to the Radhuspladsen (town hall square). After just a few minutes of walking, I looked up to see my aptly named hotel, The Square, overlooking the sprawling paved plaza that spread out in front of the Radhus, the beautiful old town hall.

I claimed my room at the hotel. The nice blonde attendant told me someone had left me a message at the front desk. This made me feel important, and more than that, relieved. A representative from the Danish Energy Agency would meet me for an interview in about half an hour. I love traveling, but doing so alone and without a context honestly isn't very fulfilling. This interview would give me a job to do and a friendly face to help me make sense of this new city.

While I awaited Peter's arrival, I settled into my tiny room overlooking the square. I hooked the ethernet cable into my computer to start using the first truly free Internet I'd encountered in Europe. I gave myself a mental pat on the back for choosing a netbook that had an ethernet port despite temptations to go with a cheaper model without one.

I pulled up Skype and called another interview prospect, a businessman who had spent five years in Georgia as head of Denmark's trade commission here. He was beginning a weeklong vacation from work, but instead of traveling to exotic locales, he was spending it working on the garden behind his 100-year-old yellow cottage. I tried to tell him I wouldn't trouble him, but he insisted I come for coffee. In half an hour, I had already made two appointments.

I met Peter downstairs. I expected an older man, but I got a tall, thin Dane who looked to be in his late twenties and spoke perfect English with a slight British tinge. He downplayed his English, saying he needed to polish it if he ever wanted a job at the EU. He had hard eyes and features. His brown hair had slight waves. We went for a quick lunch at an artisan sandwich place that showed me Danish food might give the French a little competition. The busy clerk wouldn't accept my American card. "Only Danish," she said in a disapproving tone. I was embarrassed as my new friend had to pick up the 50-kroner (about $10) tab.

Peter and I ducked out of the small shop and took our sandwiches to a bench near one of the city's many canals, just around the corner from the Danish parliament building. We talked about biofuels and climate change, and how Denmark is trying to add to its alternative energy portfolio. The country already generates a fifth of its electric power through wind energy. This December Copenhagen will host what some are calling the new Kyoto, the U.N. Conference on Climate Change.

After a nice interview, I hit the ATM to pay Peter back and get cash for my cab ride out to the suburbs. Peter left me with a Serbian taxi driver who'd been in Copenhagen for 20 years. The ride was only 15 minutes, but it cost me the equivalent of $25, a ridiculously high price for someone who's traveled mostly in China, where cab fares seem to be cheaper than the cost of the gas that propelled the vehicle to your destination. I made a mental note to take the bus or train back to the center of town.

I arrived at Kent's home about 20 minutes after 3. His wife saw the cab drop me off and met me at the front gate. She led me to the backyard, past a few apple trees, some berry bushes and across lush green grass to a patio where Kent was sitting. The coffee in the carafe was still hot even though I was 20 minutes late. He poured me some, and we began talking. He asked me how our publication was doing and gave me a detailed description of Atlanta as an international city and what the state of Georgia needs to do to attract more global businesses.

Afterward, he took me back to the city and dropped me off at the hotel. With the appointments over, it was time to explore. I walked out toward Norrebro, an area of the city the tourist map told me had thriving ethnic populations and a lot of antiques. It sounded like a place to get my cultural fix while finding a great souvenir for my wife.

Heading north, I crossed over a canal that Kent said used to be a moat a thousand years ago when Copenhagen was a fortress. When I stopped to take some pictures of the giant swans in the water, a Romanian lady came up to chat with me. Miruna was carrying her baby in front of her in a sling. She was married to a Dane, but she couldn't speak Danish and he couldn't speak Romanian. They communicate in English. A sad soul, she seemed amused to have a foreigner to speak frankly with about the difficulties of Danish life. The place is tough for foreigners. Some say it's difficult to even get a cell phone contract there without citizenship. Miruna had been jumping through hoops in hopes of gaining citizenship, but the process was taking its toll on their family. She was looking forward to a trip to her homeland to visit relatives.

We parted, and I walked forever looking for a place to eat. South Asians offered kebabs. Middle Easterners sold vegetables at streetside stands. A surprising amount of Seven Elevens tempted me with convenience store goodies. Trendy bars and pubs attracted local crowds. I passed all these up, thinking I'd find something better and more affordable. Food is expensive in Denmark. Beers are upwards of $8 and a good meal can set you back $30 easily. To put it in perspective, know that value meals at the Copenhagen's trendy McDonald's cost $10-$13. I wanted to marry atmosphere with affordability, but it didn't look promising.

I stopped at a candy store for a psychological boost and that high that comes with consuming way too many Swedish fish and strips of sour candy. The stash (I bought it by the pound) lasted until I crossed over the moat and back to the central shopping district. I found a pub offering a a real hamburger, Coca-Cola and fries for $16, a steal compared to Burger King's $13 meal.

After a lonely meal capping a long day, I screwed up the exchange rate and gave the waitress an $8 tip, equivalent to 50 percent of the cost of the meal. At that point I knew it was time to go to bed. Sweden was just across the Oresund, the body of water that separates the two countries. Another country was just one bridge away.

Photos: City scenes, from top to bottom: The old Town Hall building, Tivoli entrance, Copenhagen canal, Danish doors.

Video below: Get a good glimpse of the front of the central train station in my video explaining that Tivoli is closed:

Home Sweet Hotel - European vs. American Lodging

Appreciating American convenience after eight nights in seven European hotels

The hours of ironing, the meticulous folding, the careful closure of the suitcase and the cautious slide of the zipper: None of it mattered. When I pulled my suits, shirts and slacks out of the giant red bag I'd brought to Europe, it was clear that I'd need drastic measures to smooth out these pesky wrinkles.

An iron! I thought. My boss was paying more than a hundred dollars for this cramped room in France; certainly they would offer the courtesy of such a mundane device.

I slid open the door to the room's makeshift closet, and they were all there - the whole array of hotel laundry tools - suit hangers with clips, a bar to hang ties on, a full-length mirror. Still, though, no iron.

But I did see something intriguing. It looked like some sort of black, vertically rectangular George Foreman grill mounted on the wall. Its brown cord was loosely attached to an electrical outlet that didn't have the third hole for the grounding prong. I looked at the device quizzically, opening and closing it like the jaws of a toothless, plastic alligator's mouth. The red button on top begged to be pushed. Next to it, I read the words, "Trouser press."

It turns out that the device was pretty intuitive. You slide a pant leg through, fold the press into place, lock it and press the red button. It begins to breathe heat to both sides until your pants become like the buns of a panini being toasted. At least in my hotels in France, Denmark and Sweden, the trouser press gave off enough heat to give that few blissful seconds of leg warmth after putting on the pants, but not enough to actually remove many wrinkles.

And then you have the more obvious problem of what to do now that you have semi-presentable pants and a shirt that looks like it's been through a war. The trouser press is a limited tool, and try as often and as awkwardly as I might, it just wasn't made for pressing shirts.

The trouser press wasn't my only issue with European hotels. In an eight-day trip across France, Denmark and Sweden, I stayed in seven different hotels. It became clear that those frequented by our European friends are not always endowed with the same inalienable conveniences that a lot of American hotels promise.

Take the bathrooms, for instance. Call me lazy, but after a shower I don't enjoy having to walk back down the hallway toward the entryway to go to the bathroom. That's right, my American readers. The toilet in some French hotels is kept in an entirely separate room from the shower, sink and tub. Imagine a coat closet to your left as you walk into your foyer. Now imagine there's a toilet in it. That's just how it is, without the coat rack, of course. And just like a coat closet, there inevitably is no fan in this little restroom. (After all my travels to China, you'd think I'd be grateful for any toilet you can actually rest your behind on, but I digress.)

There are in Europe, however, two separate settings for toilet flushing - a big button and a small one on the wall - which I did find very useful. As a lazy environmentalist, I'm a bit sad that somehow this effortless water-saving adaptation hasn't made its way to the States on a broader scale.

The inconveniences in the Euro hotels didn't end in the bathroom, though, and some nifty flushing gadget couldn't blind me to other shortcomings. After I finished showering, I'd want to chat with my wife. Without a cell phone, I'd use Skype to call home. Skype requires the Internet, so I generally had to either buy three hours of connection for a decent 10-euro price or get gouged for one hour at five euros. This would've been OK at five-star hotels, but everyone knows - well, at least the owners of Quality, Comfort and LaQuinta Inns do - that inexpensive hotels should have free Internet. That's just the way the world should work.

Because of my indignance, I'd refuse the one-hour trap and get suckered into spending three hours talking, twittering, reading and writing. Then I'd need to sleep, which brings me to my next beef with European hotels:

They have no alarm clocks.

People who know me know that alarm clocks are No. 4 on my version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - food, clothing, shelter, and alarms to remind me to wake up and go after all of the above.

That said, I like to think I'm a relatively savvy traveler, so I realize that it's ultimately my fault if I don't have an alarm clock that will wake me up. I actually have two that I accidentally left at home. The blame is all mine, I admit.

That didn't change the fact that in Sweden and Denmark I had to stuff my Timex watch into my ear canal to make sure that its measly alarm took the edge off of the sleep before the automated wakeup call came from a muted phone came at the programmed time.

Contrast this with my experience in Savannah, Ga., during a business trip two weeks after returning from Sweden. Not only did I have an alarm clock with two separate alarms, noise settings and snooze buttons, but I also had a personalized wakeup call from the clerk at the front desk. When I didn't answer on the first try, she called back to make sure I was awake, and she even acted cheerful about it! I couldn't believe it.

This post isn't intended to rag on European hotels. I had a great time listening to the nightlife out my window at the aptly named Square hotel on Copenhagen's old city. I had an even better time getting to know the joys of the coffee offered as part of a "city breakfast" at the bar in a Parisian Novotel.

As Bill Bryson so humorously showed me in "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," a collection of essays on returning to the U.S. after 20 years in the U.K., America is a wonderful land, but our excessive quest for convenience doesn't always make the most sense if we look at it with fresh eyes.

Then again, as my wife would say, why would we be looking introspectively our habits when we could be watching the Hallmark Channel on our American hotel's wall-mounted flatscreen?

A serious tip: If you're traveling in Europe, especially Denmark, make sure you have at least one credit card that is PIN-activated. I've never used a PIN on my Visa in America, but they demanded one when I was buying train tickets and hotel rooms. Good thing I had my debit card too. Anyone have any thoughts on whether there's a way to get around the PIN requirement in these places?

Rough France Videos

I hope to polish a few of these and edit them more completely, but here are some rough France videos taken with my digital camera and uploaded to my new YouTube channel. Check out here some scenes from Paris and Lyon. Posts from Copenhagen, Denmark as well as cities in Sweden forthcoming.

T Minus 3

Three hours till the plane leaves. For only getting four hours of sleep last night, I'm surprisingly awake. Maybe it's the coffee. Or the adrenaline.

Just got a call from my boss. He's coming to pick me up from the office, and we're heading to the airport to dance through security and work at the gate.

Goodbye with Katy was tough. I tried to focus her energies on thinking of the souvenirs she wants from France, Denmark and Sweden. It wasn't enough to keep tears from flowing. I stayed strong, but I wasn't going to last much longer.

Got some feedback from some of the folks I'm trying to set up interviews with in Denmark and Sweden. Trip looks like it will be a success.

In T minus three, I'll be headed across the Atlantic for my first European journey.

12 Hours Till Takeoff - France, Denmark, Sweden

It's 3 a.m. I'm still packing for a week-long business jaunt to France, Denmark and Sweden.

My flight leaves tomorrow afternoon (or, technically, later today), and as the night slips away, I'm starting to feel stuck in that purgatory between the discomfort of leaving all that is familiar and the excitement that awaits me in strange and mysterious lands on the other side of the ocean.

The bags are pretty much packed, but in some ways, I never feel prepared for an international trip, especially to a place I've never been before. There's always something else I can learn, some linguistic tidbit I might need, some food recommendation that could make the difference between a delicious meal and five hours in the can, some lodging tip that could separate rat-infested inns from trendy hostels.

I've traveled to China five times, but I've never been to Europe before. After my first trip to China, I started learning the language, guessing correctly that I'd be back many times. I don't speak a word of French, and I will land in Paris with admittedly little knowledge about the artistic and cultural treasures the city holds. [Insert jealousy-induced boos and hisses here.] I probably know even less about Denmark and Sweden, although I don't feel quite so guilty about that.

There's something great about being the expert in a place, the one that everybody turns to when they need to know which cultural snafus to avoid. I've been that guy in China, and it gives you a surprising sense of superiority and accomplishment.

But there's a bad side to this as well. If you think too highly about your own knowledge, you'll have little openness to all the new things happening right in front of you. Senses dulled, you'll be so engulfed in your opinion or leading the group that you lose that invaluable attribute that the traveler must have in order to achieve a transcendent experience: wonder.

In three countries over the next week, I'll be writing about international topics like biotechnology, climate change and entrepreneurship and how those reflect. But below the surface of meetings and interviews, my inexperience in these lands will ensure that the undercurrent of awe persists.

God's world is big. He says that he put people in the places where they live so that they could reach out to him and possibly find him. I can't think of anything I enjoy more than to observe how this great cosmic game of hide and seek plays itself out around the world.