I recently attended the final public gathering of the World Press Institute at Macalester College in St. Paul. Nine journalists from around the world had spent the summer touring the country, visiting major cities and small farms, spending time in newsrooms and television studios. They were being asked to sum up their impressions briefly, one after the other, in front of an audience of students, host-families, and well-wishers.

Liselott Persson, an anchor-woman from Stockholm, Sweden, was the first to speak. She began her remarks by reassuring us that a few of the stereotypes foreigners have about Americans are simply not true. For example, all Americans are not ignorant and obese. She lauded the investigative energies and opportunities of the American press, and expressed her surprise that in the recent presidential election important issues like foreign policy, the economy, and the environment were often overshadowed by the personalities of the candidates. That would never happen in Sweden, she remarked. Her impressions of American culture were humorous, insightful, and favorable overall, and it was perhaps the tone of her remarks that occasionally had the effect of reinforcing in my mind a standard American stereotype that Swedes are a just a little bit blasé.

Elisa Sicouret, who works for a woman's magazine in Ecuador, has been to the United States many times, though never before to Minnesota. She was most impressed by the fact that there are Latinos everywhere in the United States, and not merely in the Southwest and on the coasts. She had driven in Chicago with a policeman from Ecuador, and here in Minneapolis she even found a restaurant named after her hometown of Guayaquil. Commenting on the recent election, she too expressed surprise that religious issues seems so critical to the outcome. She echoed Liselott's believe that such a thing would never happen in her country, but her reasoning was entirely different. Liselott had suggested that policy issues were too important to be swayed by religious beliefs: Elisa suggested that in her country political life was so corrupt that religious life would be degraded by association with it.

Ramesh Vinayak, group bureau chief of India Today , returned again and again, during his remarks, to the enormous part played by ideas in American life. Americans are willing to entertain any thought, pursue any new avenue of inquiry. “America is a big debating society,” he remarked enthusiastically. “It has the most creative minds, the finest academic institutions. I want my son to be educated at MIT.” He did find the electoral methods of the United States somewhat wanting in accuracy, and suggested that we could learn a thing or two from India about how to deal with the mechanics of this issue. “Maybe the United States should consider outsourcing their elections to India,” he quipped.

Louis Iba, a tall, good-natured gentleman from Nigeria, was somewhat critical of the United States in his remarks. He was appalled by the costliness of the presidential campaign process, for example, suggesting that the money could better be spent solving some of the problems America faces with its poor and homeless. He also expressed the belief that the entire educational system needed to be reformed, considering that many Americans don't even know who the prime minister of Canada is. “I'm sorry if this offends you,” he remarked a few times, “this is just my opinion.”

One thing that surprised him in particular was how often Americans complain about things. “You have running water. You have three meals a day. You have a job. You have a very good police system, to which you can appeal when you are in need or in trouble. You have a political process that allows you to choose your leaders. You have freedom to go where you want and to do what you want. You have the right to appear before a jury to state your case if you are accused of wrong-doing. And yet you complain! We have none of these things. But Nigerians are the happiest people on earth. And so I ask myself, ‘What do American's want?'”

Gu Wenjun is the news director of Dragon TV in Shanghai. Weighing in at about 75 pounds, she expressed herself with humor and sparkle, touching on immigration and the beauty of the countryside. She found the cliché of the American melting pot entirely appropriate to describe the diversity of life in America, but went on to ask herself “which parts have really been melted, and which have stayed the same” in the ethnic enclaves she visited. “People seem always to retain their ways of preparing food,” she observed, then added, almost under her breath, “but perhaps that's because American food is not very satisfying.”

Wenjun was surprise to come upon a gift-shop in the lobby of the Associated Press, “In China news is a very serious business.” She added that during the group's tour of Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and other cities, she was always the last to leave a gift-shop. “I needed extra to make sure that the things I was buying didn't say ‘Made in China' on them.” She was astounded to find Halloween costumes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in gift-shops in Texas, and American flags made into jockey shorts.

Tilcia Delgado, a reported from Panama City, echoed the surprise of many participants at how hospitable and curious Americans often are; and Petya Dikova, a reporter from Sofia, Bulgaria, expressed astonishment at how much time Americans spend in their automobiles, and how little unscheduled time even school-aged children often have. After musing out loud whether baseball or football was the American national sport, she remarked that its true national pastime might well be telling jokes. “Out in the barn, listening to country music, laughing and telling jokes as you milk the cows...that's a very healthy approach to work.”

There were few references during the presentations to the outcome of the recent election, and it was left to members of the audience to open up this line of inquiry with their questions. When asked what advice they would give President Bush at the onset of his second term, Elisa was quick to respond, “Resign;” Tilcia suggested that he might try to find out why 48% of the population didn't vote for him, and Ramesh, whose country lies close to the center of terrorist activity, suggested that the president ponder just how far a single nation could go in combating terrorism on its own.

When asked to comment on the quality of investigative journalism in this country, there was widespread agreement among the panelists that the United States serves as a model to other parts of the world in this regard.

Once the gathering had come to an end the visiting journalists retired to the nearby home of Frank and Judy Jossi for wine and snacks, and it was a great thrill to converse with a few of the participants at some length about their impressions of the United States, and also about their own countries. I particularly enjoyed chatting with Ugyen Penjor, one of seven reporters on Bhutan's only

newspaper. Bhutan is a mountainous, landlocked country surrounded on three sides by India, and Ugyen had clearly been impressed by his recent exposure to the wonders of the Western world. In fact, I detected a charming naiveté to many of his observations. For example: “I opened the paper one morning on a train, and I saw an article reporting that Michael Moore had invited President Bush to a view of his film Fahrenheit 9/11 . But the film is against the president, isn't it? I don't understand why Michael Moore would invite the president to see a film which is made against him....”

In Bhutan they have a king, Ugyen informed me, and he is widely revered by the people. He plans to institute a constitution and an elected cabinet, but many of the people feel that they aren't ready for such a step, and would prefer to remain a monarchy. The country is 74% forested, and the king has decreed that Bhutan will remain 74% forested. The nation is largely agricultural, though the introduction of small mobile tractors to till the terraced hillsides has increased productivity many-fold.”

When Ugyen informed me that he was a Buddhist, I asked him if he had ever considered becoming a monk. “My mother wanted me to become a monk,” he replied. “If a family has two sons, one of them often becomes a monk. Then all the religious obligations of the family are taken care of. It is not a lucrative path but it is an honorable one. However, I wanted to become a journalist.”

I mentioned that I had recently seen an exhibit of textiles from Bhutan at a local art gallery, and he looked pleased. “I'm glad to hear that people in America are interested in such things. Often what people think of when they think of Bhutan is only one thing—Shangri La.” I had to admit that it sounded a little like Shangri-La to me too.

A little later in the evening I struck up a conversation with Olga Manda Mwaba, a big-boned Zambian woman who writes for several European news agencies as well as for the on-line publication Africawoman . My knowledge of African geography is rudimentary, and Olga attempted to describe for me what features make Zambia into a viable nation-state. She told me about the copper mining there, the economic problems, relations with nearby South Africa, and before long she was attempting to describe the differences between the Bantu (Olga is a Bantu) and a few other ethnic groups whose names I didn't catch. The Hutus and the Tutsis, the Somalis and the Berbers, we were groping toward some kind of half-baked grasp of the exceeding complex inner life of a vast and extraordinary continent. Or to put it another way, Olga, like a veteran tennis pro, was obligingly returning my errant and amateurish ground-strokes in an effort to keep the conversational rally alive.

I eventually mentioned the name of one of the few African tribal writers I know anything about, Malidoma Somé, a medicine man from the Dagara country of Burkina Faso and thereabouts. Olga hadn't heard of the fellow, and I explained that he had written a series of popular books, including Of Water and the Spirit , introducing the West to the world of African tribal rituals.

“Yes,” she replied, “And what are your rituals? Do people in the United States have rituals? In Zambia, when someone has a baby, the mother doesn't come out of the house for a month. And then she brings the baby out for the first time, and the friends and neighbors gather, and they perform the rituals.”

I tried to describe a grandiose Catholic Mass as best I could, and I was about the expound on the deeper significance of firecrackers on Fourth of July, when the call came that it was time for everyone to leave. Yet there was still a moment left to inquire of Tilcia where the best birding hotspots in Panama are, and to begin to probe with Wenjun, with our coats on and the front door standing wide open, whether the Chinese government was beginning to change its information policies in the wake of the SARS disaster.

As we headed out into the balmy night, I was feeling twangs of regret at not having connected more meaningfully with Liselott, whose Swedish background I share, and at having too little time to listen to details of the extraordinary path Louis Iba had followed through Nigeria's troubled coming of age. The opportunities available were simply too rich, too magnificent to be fully exploited in a single evening. Such wonderful people, so eager to learn, and so willing to share.