Moving to Athens to study English?

Everyone’s dreamed of moving to an exotic hot country and living out their best lives … for many people that is just a dream, but your university could be your ticket to making this a reality. For us the reality started to unfold about a year ago when we realised our course had the opportunity to do the Erasmus scheme. Being the travel enthusiasts that we are we knew we had to explore the idea even if it didn’t come of anything. The Erasmus scheme is something set up by the EU to allow students to transfer to other countries for education.

Rewind back 9 months and we’re sitting there in a  crowded meeting talking about our options. Athens seemed like the most culturally rich city that could give us the best experience out of them all. After deciding where to go we had to go through writing about why we feel this would be a good fit for us, having to turn down living with our friends in Brighton before even finding out if we got a spot on the Erasmus scheme and lots and lots of waiting. Everyone around us started to question if there was any point waiting or if it was even going to go forward due to Brexit but for us it was no question that we would be waiting to find out if we got a place. However, for a lot of people this just wasn’t an option with the need to put down deposits and secure housing in Brighton, people started slowly dropping out leaving just three of us. This was sad on their part as it meant they wouldn’t be able to experience all the things that a year studying somewhere else would supply.

Thank God we waited! In April we finally started filling out the forms with our module information on them and the process was in action. By the end of May we had been guaranteed our spot at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and we couldn’t be happier. Our waiting and pestering our mentor paid off.

However, our planning didn’t stop there we still had to find a house, set up a bank account and book flights to Athens. The house hunting was one of the harder things as we kept finding places that would have been perfect had we believed they were truthful.
After weeks of hunting for the ideal place that ticked all our boxes we ended up finding an Airbnb that Alex managed to talk into letting us let it out for 9 months for the price of 300 Euros each. With this being right in the centre only 2 blocks away from the acropolis no one could believe our luck. With this all set, flights booked and a bank account set up all that is left to do is wait, enjoy our time with the friends we won’t see for a year and start deciding what bits from our 20 odd years of life we are going to fit into the suitcase we will take with us. Yikes.

We will officially be moving to Athens on the 11th September 2019 and will be staying there until June 15th 2020 so any tips on places to visit in or outside of Athens would be an amazing help. (or any advice about living in Greece)

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Written by Elly Babe, edited and published by Alex Hood.