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!

The post Finding An Apartment appeared first on Any Day In Athens.

The first time I traveled to Greece, everything was reminding me of Albania. The little store fronts selling brightly colored plastic goods, the local bakeries, the old men sitting about drinking espressos, riding on a public transportation bus again, the old apartment buildings with the tattered awnings over the balconies, the street food (called by different names but tasting the same), the people going through garbage bins and loading what they considered salvageable into either hand carts or tiny trucks, the foliage, the dusty and diesel filled air, the way people were driving, the old women and their little two wheeled shopping bags. 

I have been here enough times now to not compare everything. Greece is Greece, and Albania is Albania – but there are things, every now and again, that take me straight back to my childhood. Little moments, unexpected flashbacks. Like today, when I was walking from the metro stop to the bus stop on my way to language class, and something about the color of the leaves of the trees poking through the iron fencing with the chipped paint, just sort of caught me off guard in a way that didn’t make me think of anything particular, even – just those Albanian days, in general. And in the very next moment, I was thinking ruefully to myself that I’ve not been appreciating what I’ve accomplished: that I have, just as I always wanted, gotten back to that part of the world, surrounded myself in a similar culture, am living once again in a cement and tile apartment with corner stores to pop into just down the street, a farmers market happening daily in different places where I can get all the fresh produce I could ever want (just as we used to), learning a language which has long been on my bucket list (though technically what was on my list was the ancient version – but close enough)… which is to say, I am living the life that my ten year old self so desperately didn’t want to leave, when we went back to the States. 

I have always remarked, to those that have asked, that living in a foreign country was easy as a kid. I was caught up in the adventure of it, and didn’t have any of the stresses and anxieties that my parents had. 

Now, living as an adult in a foreign country, I can not avoid such things. Learning a new language is hard. Going to church in a different language, even with translation, isn’t that enjoyable. Navigating bus routes is frustrating. Finding an apartment was hard in the US – I have even more odds stacked against me here. Figuring out where to buy different things, tiny grocery stores, running across busy streets when they don’t have crosswalks, not being able to flush the toilet paper, having to conserve the hot water, windows not having screens so all the bugs just come in… just starting over, basically, in life – it all stacks up, one on top of another, until sometimes I just want to scream. Or sleep, for a really long time. I remember watching my parents go through all of this. I shared in some of those frustrations as a kid, but certainly I didn’t have to apartment hunt or worry about where to shop. Just as when I was a kid, however, I miss American cereals…

So even though I feel like I’ve settled into a better schedule and rhythm of doing enough but not too much (I was trying to do too much, at first), there is still all this cultural stress that, adaptive as I am, is waring me down. 

Yet – there are glimpses. Like that tiny moment this morning, that small window into the past that reminded me that I am exactly where I want to be. Where I’ve longed to be. So that I can remember to take a deep breath, and take the next step, and keep pushing forward, because it’s worth it. When I long for the ease of grocery shopping at Kroger, I remind myself that when I was shopping at Kroger, I was longing to be here – and when I pass under the beautiful statues adorning the grand university building I pass every day on my way to the bus stop, and when I’m riding the bus back home and peer out the window at the acropolis, and when I’m helping one of the girls in the art class carve a pumpkin for the first time, and when I blend in with the commuter crowd so well that someone asks me for directions (which I am unable to give), and when I make a friend from yet another European country I’ve never been to… I am grateful. So grateful to be here. Even when I’m the most stressed, the most frustrated, the most at my whits end – there’s no place else I’d rather be.

I’m a stranger in this land, and yet somehow, this land is home. 

The post Lost Yet Found appeared first on Any Day In Athens.