Last week, I woke up, looked at my phone, and gasped.

The temperature in Cancun was 9°C (48°F).

I had to take a screenshot and sent it to my parents. They were lacking in sympathy.

Now, I can hear my friends in Toronto aggressively rolling their eyes. To a Canadian in February, 9°C is "Patio Weather." It is T-shirt weather. It is the temperature at which you roll down the car windows and say, "Spring is here!"

So, naturally, when I texted them to complain, I received zero sympathy. They were digging their cars out of a deep freeze; I was looking at a palm tree.

But here is the thing they don't understand: Cold is relative. And architecture is everything.

The Concrete Icebox In Canada, we build houses to keep the heat in. We have insulation, double-paned windows, and this magical invention called a "Furnace."

In Cancun, we build houses to keep the heat out. My apartment is essentially a concrete bunker with tile floors. It is designed to be cool when it is 35°C outside. When it gets too warm indoors, we have these miraculous devices called air conditioners. They take hot air and make it cold. They sell mini-split style air conditioners in the local grocery stores, they are everywhere. But not one has a “heat” setting.

So when it is 9°C outside? That concrete becomes a heat sink. All night it radiates the heat, slowly. You go to bed thinking its cozy. But while you sleep, all that heat dissipates. It is leached out into the world outside, leaving you sleeping in a giant concrete cooler. It sucks the warmth right out of your body. The tile floors feel like walking on a frozen lake. And because there is no furnace, there is no escape. The inside of the apartment is exactly the same temperature as the outside, just darker.

It occurred to me that I am essentially living in an 18th-century Ice House. Before fridges, people stored ice in stone bunkers with incredibly thick walls. The physics were simple: once that heavy stone got cold, it stayed cold, keeping the ice frozen even in the middle of summer. My apartment is the same. That concrete shell soaked up the 9°C chill all night, and now it is holding onto it with a vengeance. The sun may be shining outside, but inside, I am the block of ice.

So there I was—a Canadian of Finnish heritage, a man whose ancestors thrived in the Arctic circle—shivering in my living room, wearing a hoodie and wool socks, drinking tea with frantic desperation.

The Puffy Vest Phenomenon I ventured out to the grocery store (Chedraui Selecto), and it looked like a ski lodge.

The locals were not taking chances. I saw puffy vests. I saw tuques (beanies). I saw scarves. If you didn't look at the produce section (which was full of papayas and dried chilis), you would swear we were in Calgary.

And it makes sense. If your body is acclimatized to 30°C days, a 20-degree drop is a shock to the system. It’s biological.

Funny (or disturbing) story - Iguanas have trouble with the cold. When it gets really cold they are known to fall out of trees, as they are nearly catatonic. So be careful walking in parks on a cold day.

The Hot Chocolate Economy It turns out, Mexico is prepared for this. Walking down the aisles, I noticed the Chocolate Abuelita (hot chocolate tablets) were flying off the shelves. It never occurred to me that hot chocolate would be popular in Mexico. Now I know why. (Pro tip - next time you are down, if you are at a cafe which offers “Chocolate Mexicano” - order it. It is less sweet and has a noticeable cinnamon quality.)

There is a coziness to it. Since nobody has central heating, the solution is internal heating. You put on a sweater, you drink hot chocolate, and you wait for the sun to come out.

By noon, the temperature had climbed back to a respectable 20°C. The puffy vests came off. The iguanas started moving again. And I finally took off my hoodie.

But for those few morning hours, I learned a valuable lesson: You can take the Canadian out of the cold, but you can't take the cold out of the concrete.