I’m in Germany and was teaching a class as a group in the course of a teaching degree (basically, every class period a different pairing from our German language pedagogy class would team up and teach the same students in a subsidized German lesson), and my partner for the early morning December class was from Vietnam, experiencing her first winter. She was an hour late because she was completely unprepared for icy sidewalks and literally couldn’t walk to class.

She finally got there after she made makeshift crampons out of crumpled tinfoil, which was both clever and very cute. Nobody held it against her, but all found it a little funny (she did, too).

Edit: basically, you just need the right gear and it’ll be fine, but you might feel differently about it from how you expect to. Some people love it, but most people from warm places don’t.