In my experience, yeah the language barrier is hard to deal with. Yeah, people can say it's my fault for not learning the language, but I have never been taught to learn another language and I heard it's harder to learn another language the older you get. Even with being in Finland for a total of nine months, I only know a few words in Finnish. It seems kind of weird for me to try so hard to learn Finnish when I will never be able to speak it as well as most Finns can speak English. Sounds kind of arrogant I guess, but Finns are taught English from an early age, so I think most Finns, especially around my age, will always be able to speak English better then I can ever speak Finnish. But yeah, it did make me kind of sad when I would sit and eat dinner with his family and I couldn't understand anything. I even felt strange looking up at anyone, because I wouldn't understand them, so making eye contact with someone while they are talking but I couldn't understand, felt awkward to me. And also when I met up with a group of Petteri's friends, most of them did not talk to me. It made me feel uncomfortable. They all wanted to meet me, but no one would talk to me, so I felt like they didn't want to meet me to get to know me, but only to see what I look like. Probably not true, and I know I will never understand how it is for them, feeling forced to speak a language they don't want to speak. As Petteri said, I don't want to make people speak English. Obviously they don't want to, so I don't want to make them do it. If they want to do it, that's great, it makes me not feel so alone. But if not, I'm not going to make them.

As for the sleeping in the same bed issue, most of the time my parents were ok with it. My dad didn't seem to like it at first, but for the first couple of weeks after we first met in person we did not sleep in the same bed, but the same room. I told my dad that and he still didn't seem to like it, but he didn't really make us stop. After a while he just accepted it, and my mom was always ok with it. I think my parents must of just knew I was serious about my relationship with Petteri so they were ok with us sleeping in the same room. I'm just really glad my parents and Petteri's parents were ok with us sleeping in the same room.