Located in the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea, Samsø has 22 villages, 4,300 residents and a renewable energy cooperative that’s drawing accolades from around the world. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visited the scenic isle and described how Samsø, which uses clean sources such as wind turbines and biomass for fuel, became an exporter of renewable energy in about a decade. Way to go green, and so beautifully.

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* Can ‘Burning Man’ Go Green?

Like many visitors to Copenhagen, I wandered around the hippie experiment in utopia called Christiania a number of years ago. I bought the local newspaper, strolled “Pusher Street” and passed off-the-grid homes, struck that such a place existed in a major European city. But Christiania’s future is now in doubt. “The current conservative government is feeling the pressure from developers to ‘normalize’ Christiania,” writes Rick Steves in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. 

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Sure, in some countries a generous tip for great service is appropriate. But not everywhere. “In Japan, for instance, tipping is viewed as insulting,” writes Rosemary McClure in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “In other countries, it’s considered disrespectful to hand a tip to a waiter.” How to avoid being the ugly American shelling out too much money in tips overseas? 

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Legendary magazine editor and Turn of the Century author Kurt Andersen has a piece in the May issue of Travel + Leisure on Denmark. It’s a journey into the cultural fringes of a place popularly thought of as “sensible, reasonable, healthy, tidy, virtuous, nice.”

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In our About Us section, we celebrate travel in the Age of Globalization, noting, “A visit to a McDonald’s in Shanghai is still nothing like a visit to a McDonald’s in Durban or Auckland or Newark.” We were thinking in cultural terms, but it turns out the same is true when it comes to nutrition, too. According to an AP story in the San Diego Union-Tribune, a study of KFC and McDonald’s restaurants around the globe found that the same menu items—including McDonald’s chicken nuggets and KFC hot wings—varied widely in artery-clogging trans fat content from country to country, and even from city to city. It turns out, for example, that hot wings-and-fries in New York had far less trans fats than in Poland and Hungary, and that a chicken nuggets combo in New York City had far more trans fats than the same combo in Denmark, Spain and Russia. Researchers blame the different kinds of oils used. 

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I’ve been spending the week in Grand Cayman working on a story and chatting with travelers and ex-pats from around the world. Twice I’ve found myself struggling to explain the United States’ ban on travel to Cuba to people understandably baffled by it. When they ask what I think, I find myself saying that whatever you think of Fidel Castro’s government, and I’m not a fan, you should have the right to visit the country and make up your own mind. Besides, the policy has proved remarkably ineffective. The man is still in power. All this was on my mind when I came across this AP headline on CBC.com: Citizens of Denmark, Finland, U.S. have most freedom to travel without visas. It turns out that citizens of these countries can travel to 130 countries without having to get a visa, according to a landmark report. Germany, Ireland and Sweden tied for a close second place, with their citizens able to visit 129 countries without visas. 

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