Surviving your first winter

Well below freezing for weeks at a stretch, with wind that makes it worse. Snow, ice on pavements, and a dryness that will crack your skin and lips in a way Nairobi cold never does.

It is entirely manageable. It is not manageable in the clothes you brought.

Buy winter clothing in Korea, not before you come. It is better suited, widely available and often cheaper than importing something inadequate.

The essentials, in order of how much difference they make:

1. A proper long padded coat. The knee-length ones Koreans wear in deep winter look excessive until the first genuinely cold day, at which point they look like sound engineering.
2. Thermal base layers. Cheap, sold everywhere, transformative.
3. Gloves, a hat, and a scarf. Extremities are where you actually lose heat.
4. Shoes with grip. Ice on a pavement is a real injury risk and Korean cities do not always grit.

Heat packs (핫팩) cost almost nothing at any convenience store. Keep some in your coat.

Korean homes are heated from the floor — ondol (온돌). It is comfortable and efficient and behaves unlike a radiator.

Two things to understand: it takes a while to warm up and a while to cool down, so leaving it at a steady low setting generally beats turning it up and down. And the controller is usually in Korean — photograph it and ask someone, rather than guessing at settings for three months.

Winter heating costs are the single most common financial surprise for new arrivals. A bill several times the autumn one is normal, not an error.

Budget for it from October. If your building has a management fee, ask what heating is included in it, because the answer varies and 'included' rarely means unlimited.

The dark is harder than the cold.

Short days, weeks indoors, and being a long way from home combine into something a lot of people find genuinely difficult in their first February. It is common, it is not weakness, and it passes.

What helps: getting outside in daylight even briefly, and not spending the whole winter alone. This is precisely what the community is for — the winter meet-ups exist because somebody's first February was bad.