Living in Greece

Ever since I was a toddler, taking a family vacation to Greece over the summer has been a tradition. I was only 18 months old when I took my first trans-Atlantic flight to Europe.

With my Father's side of the family being 100 percent Greek, he spent most of his childhood growing up in a home on the mainland of the country that my great grandfather had built. Luckily enough, my dad thought that it would be good for us to go and spend about a month of each summer in the very house where he had grown up. The house that we have isn't very big, but you couldn't ask for a better location for it. Our house is about five minutes from the beach, ten minutes from Athens, and within walking distance of the town square where we eat dinner all the time.

Growing up and spending so much of my summer in a different country gave me the opportunity to being to become more immersed with the culture. When I was just five years old, my parents started sending me to a day camp in our local town that I would go to every day. There was a big language barrier, but I didn't seem to care because I just found myself just playing with toys with all of the other kids. Through all of this time, I slowly began to pick up the language and started putting sentences together. A couple years later when I was about nine or ten I went to a summer camp in Greece for two whole weeks.

Along with all my summer camp experiences, one of my favorite parts about our trips is taking a four hour drive to a city named Pyrgos, which is where more of my family lives. We always go down there for about four or five days to catch up and spend some time with each other. One vivid memory that I always keep is that whenever we arrive to their house, my aunt always has spaghetti prepared for us to eat for dinner.

Another one of the strongest memories that I keep with me for the times that I'm not in Greece are the walks that I take at 2:00 AM because I'm so jet lagged. Since everything is within walking distance of our house I'm able to go out super late and see how much the town square has died down and how many cats are out and about looking for food. Something that I will always remember is the smell of a flower that I pass on the way back home from my walks called, night flowers.

Each and every year I look forward to returning to my second home in Greece, and after how rough of a year that its been in 2020, I'm hoping that I can go next year more than ever.