heat in finland and cold in alabama

I have a slightly unusual perspective on temperature due to growing up (mostly) in central Alabama, a humid subtropical climate ("characterized by hot and humid summers, and cool to mild winters"), and moving at 21 to southern Finland, whose Dfb climate is "typified by large seasonal temperature differences" with cold winters and warm summers. Although the former is in hardiness zone 7 and the latter in zone 6, the net effect was a childhood surrounded by people unprepared for cold or indeed anything that most people, including most USAns, would describe as winter; and an adulthood surrounded by people unprepared for heat.
Referenced: Köppen climate classifications (Wikipedia) and Hardiness zone (Wikipedia)

We were moving and cleaning our old flat out (two activities that could have benefited immeasurably from airconditioning) and driving back and forth from Turku to Pargas quite a bit through this last heatwave, hence passing a ton of pedestrians and cyclists. I was really struck anew how many people simply don't dress appropriately for the heat here. On the hottest day of the year, when it reportedly reached 98.6 F (37 C), we passed several people out walking in black jeans and black shirts.

Because of the frequent presence and dominating threat of high heat in Alabama, people are more prepared for it, and handle more mild bits of it better too - just as people in southern Finland, because of the threat of intense cold (albeit a comparatively rare occasion compared to the rest of Finland), are more prepared to handle cold in general:

• Residential windows have screens on them by default in Alabama - usually every window. The window is going to be opened, barring extraordinary circumstances. Exterior doors have a screen door. Same deal. In Finland, as mentioned, standard apartments tend to have a lot of giant windows that can't be opened at all. The standard is a vertical window about 10 inches wide alongside the oversized window that can be opened on side hinges like a door. These usually can't open all the way, so the air is still blocked and you can't put a fan in them or anything, and frequently are mounted with a metal cover on the outside like you'd see in an exhaust window in an attic.



• Ceiling fans are ubiquitous in Alabama, often in every room in a house or apartment. Smaller fans are common. Box fans designed to sit in a window and pull the hot air out are easily obtained. People do buy fans in Finland, and ceiling fans also exist here I have recently learned (having never seen one in person). But typically every store that could sell fans sells out in June.



• My Dad, who was already an adult when he moved to Alabama, once remarked that the way all the natives instantly gravitated towards patches of shade when it was hot or sunny was one of the first things he noticed when he moved there. This cultural wisdom is quite powerful, and I'd say it becomes automatic. Even in incredible heat, this isn't the case here in Finland. There are people in the shade, of course, but the earlier habit (from the dark winter no doubt) of gravitating towards patches of sun has a counter effect, I think.



• Dressing for the weather is pretty self-explanatory. It is, of course, easier when it's basically the standard way that everyone around is dressing for a significant part of the year. In Finland it's possible for people to think it's only really THAT hot a for a few weeks a year, whereas in a hot climate you have no choice but to adapt your wardrobe and routine for the heat and get used to whatever compromises you made (however little you like them: I know sweaty thighs is still an issue that prevents many women from wearing skirts and dresses for example). Last week my mother-in-law came over with the intention of filling boxes and bins with all her junk from her closet and then unpacking them at Knypplinge, and told me seriously that it was too hot (low 90s F) to do this more than once that day because it was really too hot to move around at all. She had come dressed for this activity in black jeans and a long-sleeved tshirt. (I was wearing a sleeveless shirt.)



• Almost everywhere you go in Alabama has airconditioning. I mean, I went to public schools that didn't - ones built before the 1970s (but I think actually it was just broken?), and of course there are still too many houses and cars without it (the elderly and sick and children in particular in them are at risk of dying in heat waves), but pretty much everywhere you could go in public is airconditioned, and it's standard for houses and cars in the modern era. It's easy to duck in just about anywhere to escape the heat. Grocery stores and shopping centers are airconditioned in Finland too, but not by any means all stores or restaurants or all public buildings. And if you step into a store in Alabama that doesn't have airconditioning, it will typically have fans or some other stopgap; in Finland it'll just have a lot of smelly people drowning in their own sweat, because they won't even prop the doors and windows open. (Who's bitter, me?)



• Of course, as is well known, Alabama lacks the infrastructure to deal with cold weather and particularly snow, and in that case infrastructure is very important since snow plows and gravel trucks belong to the city and winter tires are checked by the government.