Why Did I Move to Greece? Bucket List Travel Places? - Answering YOUR Questions!

foreign hi guys welcome back to my channel if you're new here my name is Tiffany I happen to live in Athens Greece so if this is the first time you're seeing me welcome and if you enjoy travel content I hope you'll stick around if you've been following me for a while you know I haven't done one of these ask me any things in a really long time and because there are so many more of you now thank you so much I thought it would be a good time to come on here and do a little q a a few weeks ago I asked over in the community tab here on YouTube uh what your questions are for me I have a cup of tea today instead of my usual coffee because I've reached my caffeine limit well at least my coffee caffeine limit for the day so I hope you'll grab a beverage of your choice depending on what time of the day it is as we go through these questions that you guys asked first thing what is my favorite part about living in Athens okay so for those of you who don't know the original plan was not to live in Athens the original plan was to live in Nexus so I wasn't really sure how it was going to feel about living in a big city again because I am from a big city in Texas and I lived in New York City for seven years so I thought I don't know about it but once we moved here I really liked it because it is a big city but comparatively to the city I'm from and from New York City it is relatively small it's pretty easy to navigate whether it's walking or on public transportation and the people are generally friendly but they do kind of mind their own business where sometimes on a Greek island that isn't so much the case so you kind of get the feeling of being in Greece but also being in a nice sort of international City there are a lot of people from all over the world living here and that makes it really nice the next one have I ever gone to Northern Greece unfortunately you know just in this last two years have I started to explore more areas of Greece that are not an island but not as much as I would like um to have done so far I really want to go to Joanna the lake there looks really amazing and I really want to go to Thessaloniki now I also don't know what you're referring to as northern Greece I consider this Northern but I know some people might not so if you want clarification ask me down in the comments what is my favorite Greek food okay I like almost everything I've had so I'll just give you a few my all-time favorite is zucchini balls don't ask me to say it in Greek because I've lived here for three years and no matter how hard I try I cannot say it but it's my favorite thing and I try it almost everywhere that I see it on the menu and by far the best place that I've ever had zucchini balls is it a tiny little restaurant that is usually only open from like June to September or the middle of September on EOS called octopus tree it's in the harbor if you go they only have like 10 tables so I would say just if that's you know a good motivation for you you go early in the season and you go early in the day they won't run out necessarily but their tables get full really fast the other thing I really like is a mom some people will say that it's more Turkish than Greek but we won't go there um so if you don't know what Imam is it is uh eggplant with tomato sauce and onions and feta it's and everywhere it's different just like the zucchini balls everywhere is slightly different so you're going to get it different in every place I'm you know I'm pretty stereotypical I do really like musaka um it's sort of like Greek comfort food to me so um sometimes I get that a lot and one of the best places I've ever had masaka is on the island of calumnus but not in the main town on this other side of the island where we got onto it by a boat and there aren't a lot of roads I cannot think of the name of the restaurant now but I'll put it in the description box the next one is have I ever had a bad encounter or experience while living in Greece I'm not exactly sure what this person meant and I'm sure they mean like so bad like you know physically harmed or something taken fortunately no um I have never been robbed I've never had anyone like physically attack me I have had someone attempt to rob me um here in Athens but I knew that it was happening so I mean I've had the odd encounter where people are kind of rude but like that's not because it's Greece that's just because someone is in a bad mood that day so pretty much no what do you think is the biggest Pro to living in Greece compared to America well for me I mean the way of life is the main reason that I moved here like I fell in love with Greece almost the minute I got off the plane I was like this is it this is the place for me so I mean I've never had a place where you get off the plane and you're just like oh yes this is where I'm meant to be um I've only had that happen in one other place like where I felt that connection to it right away and that was one of the other countries I've lived in in the Turks and Caicos Islands another big factor for me living here is the cost of living compared to the US is very low about a lot of people comment lately like why don't I live somewhere cheaper like in Bulgaria or the Canary Islands but I didn't move here because of the cost of living it just happened to work out that way way do you feel a lot of pressure knowing you have to produce a new video by every Wednesday first I want to say thank you for noticing that my videos come out on Wednesday because I do sometimes wonder if people notice so you answered my question um yes I will be totally honest with you guys uh YouTube is not a huge source of my income but it does provide a good supplement so I do feel pressure to produce a video um not just because of that but because people expect a video every week I think that's pretty normal on YouTube to put out a video some people put out two a week now a lot of those people who do two-week do YouTube full time so they have the time to do two videos a week I don't think I could ever do two a week unless it was my full-time gig so that would be difficult um but also like the way that YouTube works and even though they say this isn't the case sometimes I feel like if I don't put out a video one week the video the next week doesn't perform as well there are various thoughts on this in terms of like YouTube land I won't go too much into it because I know most of you are not YouTubers so you probably don't care too much now supposedly the algorithm doesn't care whether or not you put out a video every week but um and sometimes it seems that it does so it's a little bit of pressure um I'm working less now so I have more time to do filming um but I do feel the pressure to make the video better every time um because well that's just in my nature uh the next one is a little bit longer so have I ever been to Thessaloniki uh this person was in Athens they didn't like how crowded it was and um since I don't work in Corporate Offices do I think about moving to a smaller place in Greece so no I haven't been to Thessaloniki but as I mentioned earlier it is somewhere that I really want to go and actually I'm hoping to go sometime next year and I really want to take the train because you can take the train from Athens to Thessaloniki and I think that would be really cool do I ever think about moving to a smaller place in Greece so the thing about moving to a smaller place is you have to consider your social life because a lot of The Villages even if they're places where people live year round when there's not tourists and when it's winter and people stay home a lot there isn't a lot to do and for me that's not really great I need even though I don't go out all the time I may only go out once a week but I need that option um I need variety since I'm a single person cooking for myself every single night of the week is just it's probably the biggest thing I hate doing I've thought about do I want to move to naxos more back to Nexus try to but I think like as a single person it would be really difficult if you have a partner or family on an island or in a small town a small village somewhere you have more you at least have interactions with someone next question is do you ever want to travel to other places besides Greece or do you feel been there done that if so or else would you like to go okay so before I move to Greece I traveled all the time I traveled like one year I calculated all the places that I traveled like not counted countries but counted the time I've been out of the country of Qatar where I happened to be living I was gone for three months in total out of the entire year I I have traveled quite a bit um when I moved to Qatar I traveled all the time um I made a lot more money there um and it's pretty easy to fly out of Doha to almost anywhere they have flights everywhere and every year they added more so super easy uh and since I'm single and I don't have kids in school I could just sort of take off whenever I wanted to and we had very generous vacation because I worked for a university uh so I've been to a lot of places and where what I else would I like to go I actually asked this in the community tab uh recently and my number one place right now because it changes all the time I'm sort of obsessed with Japan I've been obsessed with Japan for a while um it's just super expensive to get there and it's super expensive to be there so I just have to figure out how I'm going to pay for that uh other places that I'd like to go well I'm hoping next year to go to Italy I've been to Italy many many times but I have friends there and of course I haven't seen the whole country uh it's a lot like Greece there's so much to see that you just may never ever finish seeing it other places the thing is now that I've traveled a lot I like to go back to the places that I love and do them again and again so it kind of makes it difficult to discover new places um I'd hope I'm hoping to make it to London sometime next year because well I love London I spent a month there one year when I quit my job to travel other places I'd really like to go um I'd love to go to Antarctica I would love to go to the Galapagos Islands um we could be here forever and for some reason I can't think of all the places I have a list I don't live somewhere and now I don't know where that list is it's probably in a notebook I have all these notebooks I make a yearly bullet journal and one year I listed all of the places that I wanted to go and I think I did that when I was when I quit my job because I thought okay now's my chance to see all these places so I have seen a lot of the things that I wanted to see like I've been to places that a lot of people would never consider going I've been to Oman I've been to Malta I've been to Kuwait Thailand Guatemala I would like to explore more of South America but of course now that I live in Europe that's a little bit more difficult what was my experience like when I renewed my residence permit it was a procedure easier to do online after covid they decided that this new system was going to be put in place and that everybody was going to renew their residence permit online and that sounded amazing to me because for Greece that was like a huge leap forward so my residence permit expired in the end of August of yes of 2020 to 2022. so just recently right um have I gotten it yet my renewal no that should tell you right now because it's almost December by the time you guys see this it'll be the middle of December um and I still haven't gotten it so I got all my documents translated I uploaded everything to the website and now it used to be able to you got this blue piece of paper that had your photo on it and it was basically like this person has applied and is allowed to stay here until your application is approved or denied and it was like a temporary residence permit now when you apply renew you're supposed to get this same temporary thing so they give you this temporary thing and they send you a confirmation email with that temporary thing and then they send you um the confirmation that you have applied as I got closer to the date of my expiration I emailed them and they said oh no no it's too soon I was like okay that's all they said they didn't say anything else because I fully expect them to come back and say that they need more documents for me like I'm counting on it and I'm kind of imagining what those things are um I'm sure they're going to want my bank statements again because of course the ones I gave them are from like May I did hear from another person who is an immigration attorney and back in like September she said that the people who applied for renewal in January were the ones that were being processed so it's about a nine month wait from when you apply to when you actually get the things saying come and give your fingerprints and get your new biometric card guess it was easy in the sense that like filling out the documents online and submitting everything was easy paying the fee was a little bit difficult because the system is only in Greek but I figured it out that's what Google Translate is for somebody asked me about the cost of living like where my family lives and where I live here it's a little bit difficult because my family lives in a big house in Texas on a very large piece of land and we have a pool so it's kind of hard to compare my tiny 47 square meter apartment to their giant house however rent is more than double what I pay here and I pay way not way more but I pay a little bit more than a Greek would because of my neighborhood and I was also willing to pay a little bit more to have a little bit not nicer but nourish apartment electricity is definitely cheaper in the US I can't really tell you how much buy although my parents have noticed that like the cost of their electric bills going up um I'm not exactly sure about petrol slash gasoline um because I haven't asked them recently how much it is and there it's an American gallons or U.S gallons rather than liters so it's kind of hard to do like in my head of an actual comparison um I would say that like overall the cost of living is higher there than it is here like my food is more expensive here but rent is way more expensive there and I would have to have a car there like I would in Texas I would have to have a car and if I lived let's say back in New York City my rent would be more than triple what I'm paying here probably quadrupled um and I might not have an apartment of this size it might be a studio this is a really interesting one how is it for me to make new friends is it difficult um is it Anonymous do I know my neighbors um because I know it's not the same as being on holiday and this is so true so if you come on a holiday especially if you're saying in a tourist area and you're going out to tourist restaurants like everybody is super friendly right like it's one of the things that people love about Greece is that Greeks are friendly well enough that they're not friendly outside of those situations but they're not necessarily going to like say hey do you want to hang out because they have friends so Greeks usually especially here in Athens um they have a group of friends that they have grown up with since they were small and they are still friends with those people I don't have that same experience in the US yes I'm Facebook friends with some of those people but like we don't hang out I don't hang out with people that I knew when I was like 10. whereas Greek people do and I think that's great like I'm so happy that they're formed those lifelong bonds but it does make it hard to break into that friend group particularly if you're Greek is really bad like mine is it hard to make it's hard for me to make friends because I am an introvert and putting myself out there is difficult I find it stressful and I find it sort of emotionally taxing not always but um sometimes I come back and I'm like oh I'm done now I'm done for the week and then sometimes it's fine so um if I manage my own expectations then I'm better about it do I work and if so what do I do and how easy is it to find work there so I do work but I do not work in Greece on the Visa that I'm on I am not allowed to work here it is very difficult for a third country person to get a work permit here um the company that's hiring you has to prove that there's somebody in the country or even in the EU that cannot do this job before they hire you you also have to know Greek like it's unless you're getting to work for like an international company it would be almost impossible for you to try to get a job here and not speak like fluent Greek not like the basic get good morning thank you you know that sort of thing like you have to speak Greek I don't know how it is to find work here because I don't work here would I ever consider buying a global visa and becoming a Eureka citizen so that's not actually how it works you can buy an apartment and get a golden visa for a certain amount but you do not become a Greek citizen you get a five-year residence permit that then has to be renewed every five years now the Visa that I am on if I want to after seven years I can apply for Greek citizenship um I probably will not though because of various reasons that I'm not going to go into here no um as long as I keep renewing my residence permit I will probably not apply for the Greek citizenship it takes a long time to even get processed why did I decide to leave America and move to Greece so I think I mentioned earlier when I came off the plane I kind of got that feeling I'm a person that gets feelings about things and they're usually right and I was like this is this is it um and I did I stayed for two weeks I did a two-week sailing holiday around the islands and I just loved it like I originally was only going to do a week and then before I like paid for the whole trip I was like you know what I'm gonna do two weeks because I would hate to come and do a week and then not have like regret it not staying longer and I figured if I came for two weeks and I hated it I could always leave early this is sort of how I operate life though like people are like what so I I moved to Qatar and people were like well what if you don't like it I'm like so I'll quit and I'll go home I just figured that no decision is permanent very few decisions in life are permanent so you should at least try it the last question is um have you ever considered moving to another Balkan country where prices and cost of living are low lower Bulgaria I think I mentioned this earlier but I'll just sort of address it again because like I said it didn't move to Greece for the cost of living I moved here because I love it um and actually I've been to Montenegro and while it's a beautiful country I don't want to move there I I don't think at least for me I don't know about everybody else but if I'm gonna move somewhere I really need to enjoy living there now I did move to Qatar without knowing what it was going to be like because I got a job and sometimes that's you know that's what you do but I knew I wanted to live abroad so it was sort of my path into doing that and seeing if I liked it um and again I was like well if I hate it I'll move home so uh so again I didn't really move to Greece because of the cost of living I moved to because I fell in love with it so until another place strikes my fancy I don't really foresee me leaving Greece um you know unless for some reason they don't give me my resident permit renewal and then I'll cry we'll see what happens about the residence but I'm sure they're going to give it to me but you never know and that's it um I think I'm sure there were lots more people who um would have asked me questions but maybe they're new and they haven't really had this one-on-one experience with me before because I haven't done one of these in like almost two years if you have any more questions ask them in the comments below and if there are enough of them maybe in another couple of months I will do another one so make sure you look in the comments to see if I ask answer any more of your questions or check the community tab I hope that you guys enjoyed this getting to know me um I I really like doing these I like to see what your questions are if you want to support me and my channel a little bit more than just watching the videos I do have a patreon and the link is down in the description box and if you go over there you can see all the benefits of joining that I really appreciate you watching guys I hope you'll consider subscribing and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: A Girl and Her Passport

Views: 8,274

Keywords: Athens, Athens Greece, Expat, Expat life, Greece, Travel, a girl and her passport, answering your questions, ask me anything, greece athens, greece bucket list, greece travel, greece travel tips, greece travel vlog, greece vlog, living in athens, living in athens as an expat, living in athens greece, living in athens greece as an expat, living in athens vlog, living in greece, travel bucket list, travel greece, vlog greece

Id: _Da1Wbqy0N4

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022