National pride: It was already Thursday by the time I realized the world’s most perfect flag was rippling up there above every Helsinki address. Am I crazy? Did I not notice them before? Turns out they have very strict rules for flying the Finnish flag: It can only be raised on certain days and must be taken down before sunset. The only day it can stay up for 24 hours straight is—you guessed it—the summer solstice.

I am a human coffee filter: The Finnish apparently drink the most coffee per-capita of any country, and since the better part of my week was spent jet-lagged and sprinting to meetings, I think I had a cup every place I went. My stomach feels like someone punched holes in it.

Dining with Rudolph & Mr. Ed: My reindeer arrived sans-sleigh but prepared two ways at the Ilmatar restaurant in the Klaus K Hotel: Delicate medallions shared the plate with a mini-roast cooked to such smoky bliss that its outsides were crisp like jerky. My horse at Ateljé Finne came as a rich, tender, gigantic filet. And that’s two more four-legged mammals I can cross off my list as eaten.

Architecture in Helsinki: When traveling here, try not to tell people you’re an American architecture writer, for there is no issue more contentious with local residents than the 10-year-old Steven Holl-designed Kiasma contemporary art museum. Almost everyone I talked to here despises it. I got a nice preview of the Julian Schnabel show that opens on the museum’s top floor next Friday. The paintings are so big they make this soaring airport terminal of a room look small.

$1.5135: That’s how many dollars it took to buy a Euro the same day I cleaned out the factory store at Marimekko. When I got back to my hotel, I turned on BBC News to witness the carnage, curled up in bed, and wrapped my Vanitas fabric around me like a security blanket.

And if that wasn’t enough: Oil tops $100 a barrel. Suddenly starting to feel really awful about flying so much over the next few months.

But on the other hand: If I hadn’t flown all the way here, I would never have found Finnish gelato. Green apple, currant and raspberry were elegantly scooped over an oat streusel topping at Ateljé Finne. And the berries! Sometimes I had six different berries for breakfast, fresh, juiced, dried, jammed, jellied and oozing out of some ridiculous pastry.

Happy Leap Day: I know I promised you a month ago that I’d be making some sweeping, life-changing decisions by today and I suppose you can’t get more life-changing than feasting on reindeer meat a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. Plus, I just so happened to visit a culture that has a very interesting Leap Day tradition. Only today is it appropriate for a Finnish woman to propose marriage. If the guy says no, he has to purchase the fabric for her wedding gown to ease the blow. I’d say that’s a win-win situation, ladies!

Around this time last year I was visiting my friend Julie in Seattle and I had about an hour to kill. Naturally I went straight to the Pike Place Market because hey, if someone’s throwing fish, I’m so there.

As I was walking through the little indoor marketplace I passed a store selling a bunch of housewares in this red floral pattern I knew I’d seen a million times before. While it looked familiar, and I was pretty sure it was famous, I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen it. The bright amoeba-like petals tugged on my brain as I walked up towards the food stalls. It was a slow afternoon—there were no airborne fish—so I went back to that store with the flowers. Besides, I still had a good 45 minutes.

Captivated by the way they had beckoned to me from the window, I bought a small purse printed with those pop-art poppies. From the moment I slung it over my shoulder I realized this tiny purchase somehow made me inordinately happy. The red flowers, as I soon learned, were the signature pattern Unikko from the Finnish textile company Marimekko, designed by Maija Isola in 1964. Later that day, I proudly told the story of my new purchase to my mom, knowing she’d be impressed by my talent for re-discovering this lost gem of midcentury design. “Well of course you like it,” she said. “That fabric was hanging over your crib when you were a baby.”

While I was stunned that my still-soft skull had managed to file this rather important detail, it was no surprise that my mom had discovered Marimekko more than 30 years before. As legend has it, Jackie Kennedy bought seven Marimekko dresses during John F.’s presidential campaign, and as we all know, Jackie Kennedy only needed to buy one of your dresses to make you an unequivocal success.

As I learned today when I toured the factory, the Marimekko brand could have been anything, really. Armi Ratia founded the company in 1949 with the intention of inspiring a war-ravaged Finland to find “everyday happiness.” It just so happened her husband owned an oilcloth company, and it just so happened Armi was able to recruit a legion of savvy young designers who continually breathed new life into this technicolor universe. Jackie Kennedy (my fashion idol, I might add) wore those textiles at John F. Kennedy’s side in 1960 for same reason my mom stretched Unikko and another Marimekko pattern, Pikku Bo boo, onto canvases for the nursery of her baby girl in 1977. Marimekko symbolizes hope.

Marimekko’s press director, Tiina Alahuhta—whose personality, if made into a textile, would look like Unikko—said that as part of her job, she hears stories just like mine almost every day. Children of the 60s and 70s especially love to tell her their very specific encounters with Marimekko’s wild optimism. The vibrant textiles seem to be embedded in the subconscious of an entire generation.

My earliest memories are especially sharp; I can answer detailed questions about that house where Unikko hung over my crib, a place we moved away from when I was three. But as much as I imagine I can see them there, I can’t say I remember those red poppies at all. What I do know is that wandering the halls of Marimekko today, with these wide swaths of fluorescent fabric unfurling from the ceilings like some kind of United Nations of Positive Thinking, I realized a place has never made me so happy.

More photos from Marimekko. Sadly I wasn’t allowed to snap any of the not-yet-released prints, but I guarantee you’ll love them!

In 1995 glass artist Dale Chihuly traveled to four countries known for their glassmaking traditions to prepare pieces for an installation in Venice, Italy. In Finland, he worked with a team from Iittala, Helsinki’s world-famous glass manufacturer, to produce his signature orbs and tentacles that glowed like organic chandeliers in the canals and streets of his 1996 show Chihuly Over Venice. And yesterday, I just happened to be in the neighborhood to see 13 members of his team back in action again.

Anyone can visit the Nuutajärvi Glass Village or Iittala’s larger Glass Centre and it’s definitely worth the trip outside Helsinki to watch the glassblowers pressing out Oiva Troikka’s adorable birds and iconic Alvar Aalto vases. But I can’t guarantee you’ll have as incredible a show as I did. When I arrived in the tiny town, I was just in time to see a team hoist a ball of molten glass on a lift. The guy on the top has a tube in his mouth that allows him to blow air into the glass. Gravity and some carefully-placed blowtorches take care of the rest:

For the rest of the afternoon I saw artists yanking at the glass strands as if they were gummy worms, puffing glass bubbles like chewing gum, and essentially turning glowing lava into these giant, lickable lollipops. Even the trash looked delicious. Later we stopped in at the Iittala Glass Centre to see the Aalto vases being made—which also require some serious blowing before they’re pressed into the molds—and the pieces made by machine, including these adorable little ice cream bowls which are a collaboration with Marimekko. I want one in every color.

Now with my newfound appreciation for glass I find myself carefully examining the vessels set before me at every bar and restaurant. And in Helsinki the odds are very good that your Sahti will be served in an Iittala piece, which of course makes it all the more appropriate to drink it quickly so you can check the bottom for the Iittala mark. That’s my excuse, anyway.

A zillion more Helsinki photos (and not all of glassmaking) can be found on Flickr.

I started my first day in Helsinki by meeting with my new friend Aki Arjola. Aki runs Eat & Joy, which is kinda like the Eater of Helsinki, and knows everything there is to know about Finnish cuisine. He told me about dozens of fantastic new chef-owned restaurants with brilliantly refurbished midcentury interiors, serving local cuisine like wild reindeer from Lapland and berries that, due to the short growing season coupled with almost 24-hour sunshine at the height of it, ripen to a pristine, luscious flavor unknown anywhere else on the planet.

But after telling me all that, we went to this place. Why? Because, my friends. They serve meat doughnuts.

I am not talking about the soggy meat-filled pastry you may have suffered through before; if you’re a Los Angeles native you’ll forget you ever learned how to say the words samosa and empanada. These are sticky, stretchy, glazed pillows stuffed with deposits of gooey, fragrant ground beef. They’re called lihapiirakka and in Finnish that loosely translates to ‘Krispy Kreme for carnivores.’ These are hot meat doughnuts now.

This Hot Pocket of the Gods is served every day starting at 6am at Toripoljat, a dirty orange tent pitched a fish’s toss from the water on the Kauppatori square. Even in the dead of winter, Toripoljat promises a balmy 18 degrees Celsius inside, not very likely on this 0-degree day when huge puffs of steam rose from each pastry long after it was plucked from behind the counter. But it does offer a symbolically warm environment, like on this Monday morning when a jovial mix of dapper businessmen sat shoulder to shoulder with harbor workers (the mayor, who works across the street, can often be found here as well). After Aki and I sat down with our goods the table across from us was commandeered by three men in black rubber boots so thick they had to stagger their legs away from each other at the tiny cafe table. Before my coffee was cool enough to drink, the one closest to me had already put away two lihapiirakka.

Eating a meat doughnut, as the name would infer, isn’t pretty. In fact, I thought, as I wrestled with escaping meat morsels while still managing to lick every trace of sweet from my fingers, it’s not unlike putting on a big floppy baseball glove of fried bread and beef. But also like a solid pair of mittens, it kept me warm for hours.

I arrived in Helsinki just in time to watch the place I left last night, live on television.

Except here they cut away every few minutes to a poorly-lit studio where three pundits in evening attire give the Finnish take on red carpet fashions. I’m pretty sure I heard them say Cameron Diaz needs to brush her freaking hair.

But I had yet another Hollywood moment today. You see, on the LA to London leg of my flight the guy two seats behind me had a seizure.

About five hours in I heard a brief but pretty alarming sound that was a combination of choking and moaning. However in my typically useless pre-sleep state it took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on, plus Into the Wild was playing on my video screen where, I kid you not, it was the scene where Emile Hirsch accidentally poisons himself by eating the wrong type of wild potato.

What really jolted me awake was when the man’s limbs started flailing, which in turn woke the guy up in front of him because he was so viciously kicking his seat. At this point the poor guy started vomiting on himself, and the man seated next to him jumped up, horrified. But the man in front was totally calm and called over the flight attendant. When I heard the “is there a doctor on the plane” announcement over the PA, I was having some serious Airplane flashbacks—have you ever heard anything like that happen in real life?—but sure enough three doctors rushed to his side (all from the very front of the plane, I might add).

Although he was unconscious the guy seemed to be breathing normally, but without knowing his medical history, they didn’t know if it was an emergency situation. The attendant went to get permission to land in Halifax, supposedly our last chance until London (I guess they’re not so accommodating in Reykjavik). With 10 minutes left to decide if we’d need to land or not, the guy came around and was able to answer basic questions, including whether or not he’d taken the anti-seizure medication they’d found in his bag (he had taken it, but the doctors thought the drink he had on the plane might have triggered the seizure). Crisis averted, but for about 45 minutes, it was a surreal and tense situation at 50,000 feet. Also, it felt exactly like that one episode of House where he has to make the call in the air!

So I made it, and what a treat arriving here is: The Helsinki airport is gor-geous. It’s this transparent jewel box of spotless silver and glass that’s super slick but, this being Scandinavia, there’s plenty of blond wood to keep it nice and warm. I was going to take some photos but then I decided it would probably be even prettier in the daytime. Which, incidentally, will be be rolling around here in a few hours, so I should probably try to get some sleep. Oh, wait, I’ll just watch the Oscars, that should do the trick. Hyvää yötä!

Update: Wow, this is kinda crazy, but American Airlines is taking major heat for a passenger dying on board Sunday during a flight from Haiti to New York. That’s really weird that two flights on the same airline were facing similar judgment calls on the same day, but for the record, I think the crew on my flight did a great job of realizing the gravity of the situation and doing everything they could to help.