There’s a group for nearly everything you could ever want – Treasure Hunting groups for things left out by the bins, used clothes groups to fill in the gaps left by how tiny the second hand stores are here, groups for looking for pet sitters, groups for adopting street cats, groups to look for roommates, and groups for expats to simply share knowledge and look for friends.

I was also relieved find that Facebook Marketplace is just as widely used here as in the US – I was already used to getting most of my furniture that way, and with some help from Google translate, I was able to do so again. I have a few friends with cars, but there were some items that couldn’t be fit in a sedan, so thankfully the sellers that I got my stove and fridge from offered delivery for around ten to twenty euros (apartments tend to be complete blank slates here), and I paid for a truck to deliver my couch (since I got such a good deal on it, I felt like it was worth it to pay the extra delivery fee – I paid just as much for the truck as the couch but it was still cheaper than buying new).

I did eventually find some used furniture stores, but it took some time, and none of them are easy to get to from where I live. There’s one that has several locations, called Reto, which I really like because they’re a charity shop supporting people coming out of addiction. They don’t charge much for deliver either – I think I paid thirty euros for three pieces of furniture to be delivered, and I live a bit far from them. There’s also a really big store called Paliosinitheies that has a more mixed selection when it comes to the quality of what you’re getting – they also have their items listed online, which is nice. On Saturdays there’s a big flea market in Egaleo, but I found this too overwhelming at the time. I might go back at some point now that my Greek is a little better. There’s a more permanent flea market in Monastiraki that’s mostly antiques and because it’s in the tourist district, tends to be a little pricier. Victoria and Kypseli have a lot of second hand shops that aren’t necessarily all going to have listing on google maps, so you kind of just have to wander around and find them.

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As for second hand clothing, I’ve had mixed luck. There are some places in Zografou that I found had pretty low prices, but most of the places I’ve found in other areas of the city are more of the boutique vintage variety, and not only are their prices higher and their stock pretty limited, they don’t tend to carry a very wide range of sizes. One of my Greek friends has promised to take me to her favorite places though, so I may have a better report soon! For now, I’m just very glad that Vinted has recently started shipping in and out of Greece, because I pretty much don’t buy clothes new and haven’t for quite some time. Used it just better!

Back on the topic of furniture, if you want new items, there are a few different IKEA locations, with the one at River West being the biggest one. There’s also a Danish chain that’s similar to IKEA called Jysk, and for appliances there’s Public and Kotsovolos. I bought my mattress from an online shop, and I did look at some different Greek stores for a couch but as I said earlier, ended up getting one on Facebook Marketplace. When I found the hardware stores – Prakitiker and Leroy Merlin – I finally started feeling like I might be finding my feet here, ha! Up until that point I’d felt like I was scrambling a bit, going between all these random little homeware stores I was finding just as I walked around, but once I was able to go to Leroy Merlin and load up my cart with all the bathroom bits and lightbulbs and picture hanging nails and dry wall plugs for screws and plant pots and surge protector power strips and the last of what I needed for the kitchen… that was such a relief. I never realized how much I would miss Home Depot! Much as I love IKEA… sometime they just don’t have exactly the kind of thing you need. You need variety! Types of nails to choose from! Table legs that you can attach to the piece of scrap wood you found by the bin to make a table for your thrifted microwave!

Speaking of which, riding the tram with a microwave rattling around in your IKEA bag gains you more looks than you would think, considering how few people here have cars… I’ve also carried a small tree on the bus. It’s amazing the things you find yourself capable of when you don’t want to pay for a taxi! I’ve also walked twenty minutes bearing a cat tree along with a heavy bag of cat litter – a decision I regretted more than the other two.

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Which brings us to our final item – cats! Though I did look through the Facebook groups and considered a few of the cats I saw there, I really wanted to be able to help out a bonded pair since I wanted two anyway and know that pairs are harder to adopt out. So I actually ended up finding a rescue group’s website, and found my cats in their listings there. Cat shelters aren’t so much a thing in Athens as are foster homes – which I think is great actually. I was able to go and meet one of the cats in her home setting – the other one was there as well but hid the whole time – and their foster mom has kept in contact and still likes my Instagram posts when I post about them! I just think it’s such a better situation for the cats, and it’s nice to have someone who knows their history to reach out to if a medical problem was to come up. The cats are brother and sister, and they’d just turned 6 when I got them. Now they’ve just had their seventh birthday, and are thriving!

Taking them both to the vet was definitely an adventure – luckily it’s only a ten minute walk, because I had one of them in a backpack carrier and another in an over the shoulder carrier and they both put up quick the fuss both ways. Vets are much cheaper here, but I feel like food and litter are about the same as in the US. Also, no one charges adoption fees here (I don’t think you’re allowed to), but microchips are required (probably because of the over abundance of street cats they’re dealing with), so thankfully I was able to just pay the adoption agency for the microchip transfer so I didn’t have to figure any of that out myself.

There are lots of pet stores here, but I was getting frustrated with how many different stores I was having to go to, all in different directions, in order to get all the different brands I needed for different things. So these days, I walk to the store for their litter, and just order their food with Wolt (which is a food delivery service like UberEats but also delivers from other stores). No Chewy equivalent here, but honestly with how complicated getting packages from couriers often is, ordering with Wolt is much easier than a service like that would be.

The next best service after Wolt or efood, in my opinion, is Skroutz. When I really can’t figure out where to buy something, I just look it up on there, and order it. They ship to lockers, so you just select the nearest one that has space, and then it arrives a few days later, you go and open the locker with the app, and hey presto, you have your item! Sometimes you can also get things for cheaper that way, and it saves you from walking around to various stores to price compare. It’s the closest thing you’re going to find to Amazon here. Same concept – different stores can post their items, and Skroutz is basically just the marketplace. For some reason, a lot of the items I order seem to come from stores in Thessaloniki – one time I got shoes from a store on an island I’d never heard of before. Other times, they’re just coming from suburbs of Athens that are more trouble than it’s worth for me to actually hike out to – I’d rather just pay three euros to walk fifteen minutes to pick it up from the locker than take the train for thirty minutes to the store. I have also definitely used it to find out what stores near me sell the item I’m looking for though.

Between Reto, IKEA, Facebook Marketplace, Leroy Merlin, Skroutz, and a local pet adoption agency, my house was transformed into a home! Also thanks to my friends who helped me haul furniture and took me on shopping trips – especially to the one that helped me move the washing machine. So sorry. I promise I’ll pay for delivery for that one next time.

If you live in Athens, which resources did you find most helpful when setting up house here?

Until next time!

The post Acquiring Furniture, Adopting Cats, and the Lifesaver that are Facebook Groups appeared first on Any Day In Athens.

Apartments in Athens, especially around city center, have gone up in price by quite a bit in the past few years, and prices only continue to rise. This is mostly thanks to Airbnbs. Owners can make better money renting out their apartments to foreigners for short periods of time at a higher cost than what you would charge your average renter, so it’s creating a kind of false scarcity. At least, this is how I understand it working. Probably it’s even more complicated and filled with finance terms than that. Regardless, Athens is becoming an expensive place to live, especially for Greeks. For someone used to prices in Atlanta… a little less so. Still, I’d been hoping to get a two bedroom apartment, so I’d have room to host friends and family when they visit, but quickly found that it wasn’t going to be possible with my budget (about 600 euros), if I wanted to be in city center.

I mainly used the Spigatos app and a website called XE to search for apartment listings. XE also has an app, but only the website translates into English. At first I was sending listings I liked to a Greek friend so she could call them and speak to the agents or owners in Greek, since I was told this would give me an extra leg up, as people here don’t always like renting out to foreigners. However, she’s a very busy person and didn’t really have that much spare time to help me out, and whoever was renting to me would have to figure out that I’m a foreigner eventually, so in the end I took it back into my own hands, and would simply use the messaging feature that both sites had, to inquire about the listings. I could have used google translate and sent the messages in Greek, but since sometimes they would call me back instead of emailing me back, I figured it would be better to just go ahead and admit that I only spoke English (outside of a polite greeting and asking where you’re from, which isn’t exactly helpful renting agreement conversation). This also gave them a heads up that I would need someone who spoke English at the property with me when I went to see it, since I tried to organize Greek speaking friends to come with me a couple times in the beginning, and unfortunately all of my friends seem to be very busy and possibly overworked people, and this just got too complicated. So I went by myself.

Possibly I would have been able to see more “by owner” properties if I spoke fluent Greek, which is reportedly the ideal situation, mostly because you avoid having to pay the agent fee (which is usually equal to one month’s rent), but to be perfectly honest, most the listings I was seeing were by agencies. All of the properties I was actually able to visit were by agencies, and all the agents I talked to were very friendly. I only had to use google translate to communicate with one of them, and for the apartment I ended up getting, actually a second agent that wasn’t officially assigned to the listing came to show me around, because he spoke better English than the agent that was assigned to the listing. So it all worked out in the end.

Besides the number of bedrooms, I had to adjust some other expectations as well. What I wanted was autonomous heating, i.e., radiators that you, the tenant, have control over. When these were few and far between, I decided that central heating (radiators controlled by the building manager, and usually turned on for an hour in the morning and an hour at night) would at least be better than only having heating through the aircon units (which aren’t usually installed in every room, and can get expensive to run depending on electricity prices), and THEN even when I was visiting properties that were listed as having central heating, the agent would inform me that actually, last year the building decided to stop running them, because petrol is expensive, or in the case of the one I ended up getting, “the building ran it last year, but we don’t know what they will decide for this year.” Though I have heard *something* being run through the pipes a couple of times, I haven’t ever gotten any heat from my radiators, which means the building must have decided against buying petrol, at least for this year. It’s been a very mild winter, abnormally so, according to all the Greeks I’ve talked to, but with that being said, I have found the aircon units to be sufficient for heating, have not had to run them all the time, never ran them over night, and the electricity has been (for me, at least) very reasonably priced. It seems to be about 20-30 euros a month at the moment, and that’s my hot water and my stove use as well.

I also had to extend my area of search. At first, I wanted to be as close as possible to the sea, while also being in city center. I wanted to be on the tram line, somewhere in Neos Kosmos or Nea Smyrni, but I was getting frustrated with how few listings were coming up in this area, and I also found out that the tram is pretty much the slowest mode of transportation ever. So I decided to expand my search to anything on the east side of city center, since this would still mean easy transpiration to the places I needed to get to most often. Ideally, I would be on the red metro line, but the blue line was permissible. I discovered that I really loved an area called Exarchia, as it’s full of book stores and vegan cafes, but it’s also quite an expensive area, and after missing out on one property because I took too long to decided (another note: if you find something, jump on it! These places are going fast), not being able to convince another one to come down into my price range, and visiting a third one that was just too far north in the area and thus just too far out of the way, I settled on being in a neighboring area (which is also very nice and still has vegan cafes and though not as many bookstores, it does have few and one of those is a really nice one that has lots of used books in English), called Pagrati.

Here’s what sealed the deal for me: despite an unknown central heating situation, this apartment has double windows, which, I discovered through talking to various people here, is a game changer when it comes to keeping the heat you’re producing inside your apartment. This is actually the main reason behind my not taking an apartment I’d found earlier in Koukaki, which was spacious and lovely in every way, except for the fact that it had single pane windows, and being on the fourth floor with a wide open view, was open to a lot of wind. (A part of me still hurts when I think of that apartment – I really loved it.) Some additional benefits of the apartment I ended up getting were insect screens (I was going to have to instal them myself if the apartment I got didn’t come with them – why anyone would want bugs flying in and out all day and mosquitos biting you all night when you’re trying to save money on aircon by leaving the windows open, when screens exist, is beyond me); a camera for the doorbell so that for one, I can see who’s at the door, and for another, I can make sure the door actually opened for them; lovely wood floors in the living room and bedroom, lots of storage space, newly painted and renovated (to some degree), and (well, this one was more on my necessity list) a security door. What’s a security door, you might be wondering? Basically it’s got metal plating of some sort, and has more bolts than your standard lock. Even though Greek doors already have the extra security of not having a turning doorknob on the outside (you have to have the key to get in, even if it’s not “locked”), AND Pagrati is a pretty nice, calm area, it’s nice to have that extra security, especially when you’re living on your own. Another bonus with this building is that there’s another security door downstairs, which I’ve never seen before. This is nice not only for security purposes, but because Greeks like to be extra secure and lock their building doors behind them (even though, once again, you can’t open it from the outside without having the key to turn the latch), the automatic “lock behind you” feature means that I don’t ever have to run down and manually unlock the door for anyone when the buzzer doesn’t work because someone’s locked the door. To get out, there’s a little button above the handle that unlocks it, and to get in, there’s the buzzer for guests, and a fob on my keys for me. It’s all very convenient and fancy and I feel very bougie for having it!

The downsides to the apartment are that the walls are pretty thin and I can hear a full conversation happening next door and a dog running around overhead, and that it came fully unfurnished. By which I mean, no stove, no refrigerator, no washer. I’ll go more into furnishing an apartment in another post, but getting a “blank slate” vs having something with a few more things, or even everything (I did look at a fully furnished apartment in this same area, but I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to live with someone else’s furniture choices, though it would have been very convent to not have to buy anything, not even utensils), is definitely something to consider when it comes to prices.

Back to the actual process of acquiring the apartment: Once I’d seen it, I knew it was a good contender, and that a lot of other people were looking at it. Someone else was actually viewing it at the same time as me. Additionally, the time on my visa was ticking down, and I needed an apartment in my name in order to proceed with my residency, so I was under a lot of pressure to find something and make a decision quickly, for multiple reasons. Still, I made myself take the time to see two more properties the next day, and after those didn’t pan out, texted the agent as I was making my way home from those, praying that the apartment was still available. It was. He said he would contact the owner the next day (it was night at that point), and just like that, the apartment was mine.

At least according to WhatsApp messages. I was about to go out of town for the weekend, so I couldn’t sign the contract right away, which was stressing me out. I thought, however, that I would be able to sign it Monday, when I got back. In the end, I wasn’t able to sign it until a whole week later, because the lawyers were on strike and so my contract wasn’t even being written. But finally, finally, I was able to meet the agents at the lawyers office, sign the contract, and after a bit of a scramble to find out the owner’s zip code so that I could make a bank transfer for the rent (he doesn’t live in country), I finally had the keys to my new place. Ironically, I wouldn’t even see if again until a few days later, because I was commuting out of Athens every day during that time for another course I was taking (a nice additional complication to this entire process), it was already getting dark out by the time I was done signing and there was no power in the apartment yet, so though I did go just to see it again later in the week, I had to wait until the weekend to clean it because I needed daylight. (I’ll also go into signing up for power and water in another post – the list just goes on, doesn’t it?)… So, in so many ways, it was a huge weight off my chest to finally have an apartment, but in other ways, a whole new list of to-dos and things to figure out HOW to do, had only just arrived!

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