Travel Tips : Stockholm and Oslo

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Over the past two weeks, I've had the pleasure of visiting Stockholm (Sweden) for a conference, and Oslo (Norway) where I attended the Nobel Peace Prize Concert. In this posting, I'll touch on the two cities and the conference, and then in the next blog entry, I'll go into the Nobel Prizes and the Peace Prize Concert.

Last Tuesday, I landed into Arlanda International Airport (about 40 km from Stockholm city) around midnight. I hopped onto the Arlanda Express train (somewhat like our KLIA Ekspres) down to the Central Station, which was near my hotel.

Yes, Stockholm is snowing at this time of the year. It was minus 7 degrees C the night I got there. There were many winter wonderland scenes, and it certainly looked great but was freezing cold, especially when I didn't come prepared with a hat or something to protect the ears, a situation I was only able to remedy two days later. Brrrrrrr ....

The Public Services Summit 2010


Cisco held a two-day global Public Services Summit in Stockholm and I was the host to a number of senior government officials from ASEAN countries. The Summit provided a platform for insightful presentations by public sector officials and global thought leaders,and allowed for in-depth discussions and sharing sessions. This is the tenth year that Cisco is organizing this conference, and most have been in partnership with the City of Stockholm during the Nobel week.

Most of the conference sessions were held at the Sheraton hotel where the delegates also stayed. Different halls and rooms were allocated for this, although there were two modules which included tours of various government locations in Stockholm.

The Mayor of Stockholm gave the opening address ...

There were many interesting presentations and active panel discussions  ...

We had a well-known futurist Juan Enriquez, who gave a very thought-provoking presentation. He wrote the book "As the Future Catches You" ...

Later we also had the author Clay Shirky present his ideas. A very smart and articulate chap. Later that evening I also had a chance to sit next to him at dinner and chat. Pity I didn't have a copy of his book, to get his autograph.

To end the conference, we had a Telepresence session with John Chambers, Cisco's Chairman and CEO. John was sitting in his office in San Jose, California while the MC and members of the audience in Stockholm asked him many questions for over 1.5 hours. Wonderful demonstration of how technology makes distance irrelevant !

Shopping in Stockholm

I must say I didn't do much shopping as conference activities filled up most of the time. However on one of the days, we had two hours free over lunch, and I popped out to the nearby shopping area together with one of my guests ..

AH LENS is one of the major departmental stores in Stockholm.

This is the section where there are many shops located underground ...

Within the GALLERIAN mall ...

Dinner and Entertainment

The dinners and cocktails were always interesting. Some of the dining venues were in very classic halls, like this one  ...

The entertainment varied from violin-playing lasses to hits by Abba ...

After Stockholm, we brought all our guests to Oslo in a chartered train. A nice and relaxing six hour ride ...

At the train station platform ...

Some guests relaxing in the train ...

Free food and wine were served ...

When we got to Oslo, we all had a few hours to rest before it was time for dinner followed by the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at the Oslo Spektrum multi-purpose arena. More on this in the next posting.

Well, that's it for now ....

WHAT did you say? You wanna see more Swedish ladies? OK, OK ... how about this shot of our lovely Swedish guides to the whole event?

Geez, you guys are hard to please ...