Tere!

You may know that I am Japanese (as the website title says so), but you may not know where exactly I am from. I’m from Wakayama which faces the Pacific Ocean, so it’s a pretty warm place. I spent 18 years there, and we said 17 degrees was cold. But now as you know, I live in a place where the lowest outside degree can be -20 degrees.

Last few years in Estonia, winter has been quite warm. I have lived in Estonia for three years and half now and here’s what I bought after experiencing four winter:

Traction cleats!!

Can you imagine what this is? Imagine the shoes for football then. They have spikes on the shoe bottom. For football, those spikes prevent players from slipping on the grass ground. So the logic is the same for the Estonian winter situation.

The traction cleats also prevent slipping not on the grass ground but on the icy roads!!!

When it comes to the climate in Europe, many people might think it’s pretty dry, but in Estonia it’s relatively humid. The logic is like this: it snows, the snow melts a bit, and it becomes ice. Thus some parts of the grounds are icy and slippery.

And this is very dangerous.

Additionally if the icy part of the road is under the snow, you immediately fall on the ground.

That’s why you need gloves. (In fact, once I didn’t wear them and fell on the icy ground, and I got a hand cut in Estonia.)

This winter it started snowing later than usual, but the real feel went down -20 degrees, and eventually it snowed a lot. However, some time around Valentine’s Day, the snow started melting, and it rained on the previous day of the Independence Day (which is on the 24th February). And this rain was awful.

After it stopped raining, I wanted to go to a supermarket, and was about to step out. Then I fell on the ground.

After all, the lower back had hurt for two days.

Immediately I gave up trying to go to a supermarket.

There is a parking lot in front of the main hallway of my flat building, and the parking lots tend to be really icy and become slippery. So all the ground was frozen. THAT WAS THE HELL.

But I still wanted to make a potato salad, so I decided to get ice spikes. (One of my Estonian mates said they eat potato salad on Independence Day. I wanted to have some tradition like Pancake Tuesday in Ireland/the UK, on which we have pancakes.

Then in the morning of Independence Day, I compared the taxi prices of Yandex (Russian Uber) and Bolt (Estonian Uber), and went to Kristiine keskus by Bolt. One of the members of a Facebook group called Tallinn Expats mentioned Prisma’s shoe corner has the traction cleats. I went to the corner, but I couldn’t find it so I wandered around Prisma, and then found the rack specifically for traction cleats.

There are two products: 9 EUR one and 6 EUR one. It seemed both were supposed to have four size ranges, but two middle size ranges were all gone. What I wanted was the second smallest one. The cheaper type had only the biggest size range. After wondering if I should buy the smallest size in 9 EUR or give up, I eventually decided to buy one. Luckily I could wear them!

By the way the shoes that I was wearing at that time were size 36, usually I choose size 38 (in Europe). The traction cleats that I bought had size 35 at maximum. I think I could wear them because those are made of rubber.

Those were not cheap, and it was a sudden expense, but it was good shopping. I feel like I could walk 95% confidently. The rest 5% is that I still slip wearing those, but I didn’t fall on the ground anymore.

Therefore, when you come to Estonia in winter, I highly recommend you to bring traction cleats!

Aitäh! 🙂