The first week was a lot - but in a good way. We arrived safely on Sunday morning. Our Airbnb is great. Thankfully it looked just like the pictures, and our host is really nice.
The location is perfect because the bus stop is just a few minutes down the street and it doesn't take long to get to the city centre and to the beach.
The work placement is good. To be honest, I didn't expect the language barrier to be as difficult as it is, but it is a challenge sometimes if you work in a Greek travel agency with only Greek customers. Therefore we can't work directly with the people who come in, so we do work in the back office basically. We add tours to the website, because that way we can work with an editing programme in English. But the people from the travel agency are really nice and we have good working hours. There are a lot of coffee shops and bakeries nearby since we work directly in the city centre which is great for a coffee break.
On Monday we met a few of the other Erasmus+ people, mostly Germans, and we usually spend our free time together now. Since the beach next to our apartment is a bit dirty we always go to the beach in Amoudara, which is right next to Heraklion, where the other Erasmus+ students are staying. The beach there is much cleaner and bigger and Amoudara is really popular so there are a lot of bars and restaurants.
At the weekend we went to visit the Crete Aquarium and the beach. On Sunday we went to Matala which is a popular tourist destination, mostly because of the caves carved into the rock where Hippies used to live back in the days. It was genuinely interesting to see the caves because I imagined how they looked when people used to live in them. In some of the caves you could figured out where the bed must have been and so on. The beach in Matala is also beautiful and we went cliff jumping.
Generally speaking, Greece is much cheaper than Austria. Restaurants, taxis, groceries, public transport - everything is cheaper more or less. We once paid around 11 euros each for dinner at a restaurant which in Austria would only be the main course. And the best thing about Crete - you get a dessert on the house in almost every restaurant :) They also serve you Ρακή, which is an alcoholic drink, for free.
Also there are a lot of cultural differences. In Greece it's okay to be 30 minutes late but that's a big no in Austria. And they talk loudly so sometimes it seems like they are fighting when they're really just talking normally. This was surprising at first but I'm used to it now. I also now know how to say a few basic phrases in Greek like "good morning" or "thank you" which is Καλημέρα and Ευχαριστώ.
So overall a great first week. You get used to everything quickly and sometimes it feels like I've been living here for a month already. I have a feeling that the time is going to fly by so I'm trying to enjoy it as much as possible.
See you next week!
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