The Week In Review....

Busy times here in Sweden. It's been a roller coaster week....extremely positive though. This past Monday I learned that I was a finalist in a business idea contest that I entered. The contest was part of Global Entrepreneurship Week sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation. The prize for four lucky winners was a trip to Hong Kong. I was extremely happy about being considered for this prize. The ceremony was in Copenhagen at the Copenhagen Business School on Wednesday. Since I really enjoy Copenhagen I wanted to make the most of my day. I set out on the 9:30 train from Lund and made it to Copenhagen an hour later. When I got to the city I basically set out to wander around and see what I could see before I needed to hike the 5k to the school for the ceremony.....

The building above is one of the cool things about Copenhagen. It's a weather dial more or less on the side of a building. The temperature is shown by the neon lights, and the forecast can be found by looking at which statue is present on the top. If it's the girl with the bike then it's sunny and nice, if it's the girl with the umbrella...well, it's rainy and not so nice. When it's half and half...well, that's just Scandanavia this time of year I think.

Further down I found this great outdoor food bazar. It was an international food market complete with FREE samples!! Lunch was served. Since I was dressed nicely for the afternoon presentation, I was able to get three full laps in on the sample trays before people started looking at me with that typical 'here comes that scumbag again' look. Meats from Germany, crepes from France, candies from the UK, palella from Spain, and wooden shoes from Holland? Maybe Holland missed the part about 'food' on the international food market invitation flyer....

Everytime I've been to Copenhagen, wheter it be really late at night, early in the morning, raining, or sunny, there are always people out and about, walking on the main pedestrian streets. It makes the city inviting to explore.

Of course no trip to Copenhagen is complete without at least a stop off in Nyhavn. The harbor borough sits at the end of the long pedestrian causeways in the city. It's a simply stunning place if you catch it on a sunny day. For me the weather was gray, but the place still had its charm. The boats looked somber and tired for winter was ahead.

At this point in my day the weather turned a bit colder and the rain came in a bit harder. I thought I should find shelter, get my bearings and prepare my route for the hike to the ceremony. What better place to do this at than a (covered) street meat kiosk! One french hot dog later I was off to the ceremony. The walk itself took me to the north and west of downtown to the district of Frederiksberg. I really liked this place as I walked through it. It was a bit rough around the edges in that 'you're totally safe here' kind of way. There were cigar and tobacco shops that lined several blocks....occasionally you'd get a whiff of an old salty Dane pulling a puff from his wooden pipe as he passed you by on the street. Finally I arrived at the school. I made my way to the ceremony and mingled with the masses until they announced the winners. Sadly enough I wasn't selected. After learning the scope of the ideas they did select I was happy to pass on this trip. I've found more exciting concepts starring into a bowl of bean soup then what these people came up with. Boring.

Anyways, the rest of my week was pretty much focused on program work. There is an incredible amount of opportunity here, it seems like I learn about something new every day that excites me. However, it's that age old problem I have where I want to be a part of all of it and I spread myself too thinly across the board.

A few sidenotes to the week. It snowed here in Lund...we got probably 6 inches, which translates to three inches of snow and 34" of ice....I'm thinking it would have been good to bring crampons and an ice ax from Colorado.....

I have been doing a bit of environmental work while I've been here. The main topic has been micro carbon credits and their use as an economic driver of rural development in under developed countries. As part of that I reached out and reconnected with Dr. Henry Liu who is the inventor of the Green Brick. There are some really positive things happening with that project right now....as you know, I'm always up for a good chat about fly ash.....

The group I've been working with on developing a mobile platform for cellular phones landed a huge meeting for this next week. We're meeting with the largest aggregator of mobile technologies in Sweden. I'll have to dust off the suit for this one.....

Last but not least, the holiday lights are up in the city center now. It really feels like the holiday season is upon us. I tried to convince a group of my classmates that we should go caroling to finance a holiday party......I think I had them sold on it until I mentioned that I wouldn't actually be singing, but that I would be handling logistics and management of the operation. The wheels kind of fell off the pitch shortly after.