Helsinki is many things. It is cold. It is dark. It is full of unfriendly Finns who never say hi when you meet them. It is expensive. It does look like in the final episode of Night on Earth; filled with snow, grumpy bearded taxi drivers and sad stories.

I went to a metal show, of which they have plenty here. Like in Reykjavik, the venue served as a bar, a club and restaurant at the same time. Walking through the brightly lit restaurant, I entered the dark club: four tattooed men were standing on a stage, sweating and naked to the waist. But instead of shredding on guitars and screaming their lungs out, these gentlemen were performing a freak show. The floor of the stage was covered in what looked like blood and other bodily fluids in the stage lights. Then one of the men, a bit fatter than the others, pierced both forearms of a skinnier companion with two metal rings, and more blood dripped to the floor. The fat man hooked two long chains to the bleeding rings in his companion’s arms and started pulling. I turned around and walked to the bar.

I took a ferry to an old fortress built by the Swedes in 1748, who ruled the country until the Russians took over in 1809. It is now used by the Finnish army and navy, who gave the Russians a pretty good hiding in 1940 but nevertheless lost the war two years later, a thing some people in the country still remember, as a drunken man told me one night. He rambled on about the Russians and the raped women of Berlin in 1945, and as he started doing the Hitler salute a Finnish friend chased him off. The island was cold and a mean wind made my eyes water when I walked around the 18th-century buildings and a church that had old cannons and chains for a fence. I crossed a bridge to a smaller island, and a young Finn with a colourful jacket walked past, greeting me with a friendly ‘Hei‘. I was so surprised that I stopped in the middle of the bridge and watched him walk down to the ferry.

I walked on the frozen sea, something I’ve never done in my life before. Most parts of Helsinki harbour freeze in winter, so the people here use it as a shortcut whenever possible, even skiing to work or walking their dogs on the frozen water. The wind was cold and hurt my face, and the ice was creaking and there was open water near some of the islands scattering the harbour. I felt nervous for a moment, but the sun was setting and lit the houses on the shore blue and green, and the moon was up already behind a red wooden house on a small island in the bay, and then I felt safe and detached and happy.

I bought the English translation of the Finnish national epos, the Kalevala, to learn more about Finnish history and folklore. While all other Scandinavian countries wave their Viking heritage and their Thor’s hammer necklaces frantically in your face, I never saw any of it in Helsinki. An Englishman who lives in Finland for 25 years told me that there are no trolls or hulder or Huldufólk here, like in Norwegian woods and Icelandic valleys. In Finnish forests, there is only frost and misery, it seems.

After the metal show, where I had too many shots of the local licorice schnaps called salmiakki, I walked a friend home and we crossed another frozen part of the Baltic Sea, covered in fresh snow. We threw each other drunkenly and laughing into the snow and made snow angels, something I haven’t done since I was eight. Our breath was coming out like billowing smoke and my feet were frozen, but it felt as if something eased, deep inside me, lying in the snow and looking at the black sky and Helsinki glowing in the night, just for a moment.

I went to another concert, this time with two melancholic Finns from Lapland. The show was of a teenage crush of mine, and she played an acoustic show in a small club with a friend, guitar player Danny Cavanagh of Anathema. We stood in the first row and drank red wine and beer and salmiakki, and Anneke and Danny played ‘Blower’s Daughter’ and ‘Teardrop’ and ‘Natural Disaster’, and the room was eerily quiet after each song. And when they played ‘Untouchables Part Two’ for the encore, I was suddenly surrounded by a room full of crying Finnish men and women, all sobbing without restraint in the warm dark cavern of the club.

Helsinki is many things. It is sometimes hidden behind a curtain of gloriously fat snowflakes floating silently to the ground. It is home to people who do not say hi very often, but cry at your shoulder during an acoustic concert. It is proud of its history, but never rubs it in your face. It glows in the night.