01: YVR > LHR > HEL

[1-minute read]

We’d met exactly one year prior.

In the early minutes of January 1, 2014, on the dance floor at Buffalo Bills in Whistler, B.C. Now we were celebrating our first year together with a five-and-a-half-week winter-holiday through Europe.

I didn’t know yet that this trip would completely reshape me.

We’d started in Finland in mid-December, after three months of long-distance.

Much like its people — and his maternal side of the family — the five days we spent in Helsinki were uniquely special. That’s a corner of the world where public nudity is a norm. Families, friends, and foes all get naked together. Sweating it out in saunas before plunging into low-temperature waters. Exposure is cultural. Privacy is optional.

My upper-middle-class, geriatric millennial ass had grown up with both a swimming pool and a hot tub in the backyard. You might say I could relate, but only in part — my family and I weren’t doing it naked.

Finland, you’re so… Nordic.

North America, you’re so… rigidly binary [and yet still so pervasive].

Meanwhile, Finland is considered the happiest country in the world.

I’d picked out a stylish mid-century lakeside hotel, 20-40 minutes from Helsinki. The sun didn’t rise until about 9:30 a.m., before it would set again at 3:30 p.m. Not too dissimilar from the long winter nights in the Vancouver suburb, where I was born and raised. Or the Toronto suburbs, where he was from.

My first clue should have been the way he couldn’t look me in the eye when he picked me up at the airport.

Up next >> Chapter 2: Helsinki Café (Cinco de Mayo flashback)