My longest day. Ever.

I’m here at the Participatory Academy at Vaxjo University in southern Sweden — barely. Here’s what happened.

After an 11-hour flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt, Germany, I asked a fellow passenger for the local time. He gave it to me, and I set my watch eight hours ahead, from 12:45 am to 8:45 am. Had a long layover, so went to a cafe and did some work. Then headed to the gate to catch the final leg of my flight to Copenhagen. I got nervous when the terminal was empty. I stopped a maintenance staffer and compared times — his was an hour ahead of mine. I missed my flight by 5 minutes. Apparently my fellow passenger had forgotten to factor in daylight savings time — there’s a 9-hour difference this time of year.

Fortunately, there was another flight three hours later. “You’re lucky — these flights to Copenhagen are usually filled,” the Lufthansa agent told me. I caught it and arrived in Copenhagen wiped out from no sleep in 24 hours. An hour later, caught the train to Vaxjo and arrived at 10 pm.

Only one problem — no one was there to meet me. I had emailed my contact person at the university from an Internet terminal at the Frankfurt Airport nine hours before (can’t wait to see the bill on that one), since my Cingular account doesn’t cover Europe (or at least I haven’t been able to get my Nokia cell phone to work here).

I put on a jacket, accosted two local Swedes, Britt and her college-age son, who called a contact of mine in Malmo, who in turn called my contact’s boyfriend, who directed us to a nearby hotel (the wrong one, it turned out, but by then I insisted on a room to collapse in). Finally hit the sack after more than 30 hours.

I never found out why my contact didn’t show, but next time I’ll insist on getting her phone number in advance. And I’ll double check on that time change.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.