The Swedish capital reveals itself to those who get an early start—or, better yet, never go to bed to begin with. Patrick Symmes stays up all night in a city that has morphed from cloistered enclave into a multi-ethnic mecca with a perfectionist streak a mile wide

Arriving before dawn, dwelling in that foggy realm between time zones and unable to speak the language, visitors are blessed even above Stockholmers—who, after all, merely eat, sleep, work, marry, live, and die in this astonishing city. I, on the other hand, dined, laughed, looked, and walked; saw old friends and made marvelous new ones. And for most of this time, the Swedes were just sleeping.

The name of this blessing is jet lag. My memories of Madrid are the cold hours between 3 A.M. and the opening of a churro shop. Paris is always a pre-dawn blur. Copenhagen consists entirely of breakfasts. Now, here was Stockholm, from its medieval core to its twenty-first-century fringes, revealed empty and raw at four in the morning, at which time I was invariably either just getting up or just going to bed.

There I was, striding alone through the twisting cobblestone lanes of Gamla Stan, surveying the Renaissance cathedrals and the dark-windowed merchant houses, whose studied plainness—burnished to an alarming degree, every storefront neat and ambitious—speaks volumes about a people almost completely absent in those lonely hours before dawn.

Such an off-kilter approach reveals a place quickly. At 2 A.M., still early in my visit and tied by my circadian rhythms to work and family in America, I walked restlessly across this San Francisco–size city, where interior rivers pour out past an immense archipelago of 24,000 islands into the Baltic beyond. Stockholm itself is made up of fourteen islands, sewn together by fifty-seven bridges and backed by the steady sound of rushing tidal currents. Worried on first glance that the Swedish capital was too spick-and-span for my gritty taste, I soon stumbled upon police officers calmly facing down a hardened drug addict.

The few others I saw in those wee hours were Chinese delivery drivers, kids struggling home from the late-night clubs of Norrmalm, and Surinamese cabbies surprisingly well versed in Rijk architecture and Baroque palaces. (However much the blond stereotype may endure, today's Stockholm is a cosmopolitan, racially diverse city.) Each morning, at the end of my lonely patrols, I was tutored in the lip-twisting umlauts of the language by the very first employee to rattle his keys at some vaulted coffee bar in the Old Town. "Good morning—Coffee, thanks. Apple pie, thanks. Thanks."

To see a city alone, empty, just a canvas—that's the thing. I was looking for somebody during my visit, but until she showed up I had the place pretty much to myself. Jet lag. If you can keep your yawning mouth shut, it's a good way to start a city.

Stockholm may be the most user-friendly metropolis on earth. Even the machines, from the whisper-quiet airport train to the luminous keyless-entry lock on a seventeenth-century town house, speak better English than you do. Too much perfection can make the city seem more bland than blond, but it exerts a subtle magic, a world-beating dream of sensible Scandinavian success.