I recently sat down to speak with Jackie and Joel Smith, who have a wonderful story to share about their expat experiences, after having moved from Seattle to Greece in 2017…
Kat: So, what brought you to Greece?
“It stopped feeling like travel and started feeling like we were borrowing time from a life we hadn’t stepped into yet.”
Kat: How did you discover this little spot that you are in?
Joel: “We found it on one of our road trips, and, in fact, we found it by accident.
Jackie: “We were headed to a neighboring village where we had reservations and we were hungry so pulled into Agios Nikolaos for lunch.
“We decided to look around a little bit, and as we left Joel flippantly said, ‘If we ever get serious about moving, this might be on our list.’
“And now we live here! It’s about an hour from Kalamata, which is about three hours south of Athens.
“That’s how it all came about—it wasn’t a long planned out retirement plan or a goal to move to Greece.”
Joel: “It’s not curated. It’s just life happening slowly near the sea.”
Kat: Have you moved to Greece full time, or are you still traveling a bit and spending time in other places?
Joel: “Well, we kept a home back in the United States, but we’re only there about once a year.
“One of the reasons we moved to Europe was we wanted to travel more in Europe, so we still do that.
“And we have a love affair with Southeast Asia, so we travel there pretty regularly, as well.”
Kat: So if you’re not here full time, what kind of visa did you decide on?
Joel: “We went for a permanent residence permit. We renew every three years, and it allows us to stay longer than the 90 days allowed in the Schengen visa.”
Kat: What does a typical day look like for you now?
Jackie: “A typical day might be that I walk to the beach to meet a girlfriend for coffee. I walk through an olive grove, because our road goes through one and then along the sea. It’s about a 20-minute walk.
“We girls meet for a bit, and then the husbands join, and it turns into this long conversation—us all just sitting for ages, catching up.
“After that I might run some errands… but you don’t cram a lot into a day, and things do tend to take longer.
“We don’t have garbage pickup, so one day you plan a trip to take your trash to the municipal center… we have no post office, so to send or receive a letter we have to go to a neighboring town.
“Your rhythms have to slow down. At the end of the day when you get home you say, ‘Well, we bought some groceries, had a cup of coffee, and stopped at the hardware store and the day is gone!’”
Kat: Have you adopted any new hobbies since moving?
Joel: “Growing olives!
“We have about 17 trees. We pick the olives, then take them to the local processor. There’s probably four or five of them in the community, and everyone comes to them to have the guys do the pressing.
“We process about 40 to 50 liters in an average year. We use some ourselves and give some of it to friends.”
Jackie: “That might be our new talent expansion. He was born and raised on an apple orchard, so we thought he had some experience.
“But it’s a completely different world when you’re growing olives!
“The other thing that we’ve done is get involved with the animal rescue programs. I think back to living in Washington, we would send money to organizations.
“Now, we’re hands on—working on fundraisers and baking and serving cakes, adopting cats! You become personally involved.”
Kat: The big question, especially for retirees, is the language question… how have you dealt with Greek?
Joel: “It’s really not been an issue at all for us. Greeks are so fluent in so many languages that we seldom find ourselves in a position of needing to be able to speak Greek. The younger generation, 50 and younger, speak English. An older person probably won’t speak English or if they do, they’re not going to use it.
“I am studying Greek on Duolingo… and after two years, I can answer in one-word replies but I could not carry on any conversation with anyone.
“I can read some of the Greek. But road signs are done in English and Greek.
“Technology also makes it all much easier for people now. Several of our workers, some who are Albanian, have come and they will have the program that you speak into it, and we talk to each other by speaking into it.”
Kat: What about socializing—have you found other English speakers, other foreign friends? Are you friends with locals?
Joel: “You’d be surprised at the number of foreigners here. We are on the edges of a tourism hotspot, and our village still feels a big swell in the summer. Tourists here aren’t American, they’re European, Middle Eastern, and Chinese mostly.”
Jackie: “As for our world, our little neighborhood, we have probably 10 houses on our street and it’s like a little UN—we are the Americans, and for neighbors we have Germans, a woman from Peru, Greek, British, French…”
Kat: What did the folks back home say when you floated this idea of moving to Greece?
Jackie: “Our close friends thought we were a little out of our minds. They’d argue, ‘You’ve got everything here. What more do you need?’
“And our reasoning was that we didn’t want more.
“We wanted less. So, we wanted to slow down. We wanted less traffic, less taxes, less big city grind and just get back to our roots a little bit.”
Kat: What about the downsides—what has been the most challenging thing about life here?
Jackie: “We’re surprised about how long it takes to accomplish things that should be fairly simple, like getting the plumber out, getting an electrician out. And when the plumber says he’ll be out that afternoon, he arrives at 8 p.m., and argues that it’s still afternoon…”
Joel: “And how prevalent the bureaucracy is here. People complain about the bureaucracy in the United States. It doesn’t hold a candle.”
Jackie: “And I do think that we brought our American mentality.
“Getting coffee in the States is a quick thing, but here it can be hours. People come and go, the fruit man comes by and you buy your fruit off the truck…
“You have to slow down your expectations as well as your lifestyle, which I think we’re getting into now that we’ve been here a while.
“Something else that I have discovered and love about life in Europe is the flexibility you have to have. You don’t necessarily have a plan that you follow by the minute, you go and you see what pops up.
“The fruit vendor comes by and he’s got some great strawberries. Then you need to go to the bank to get cash because the fruit vendor can’t take a card, so it becomes this whole adventure.
“And, I love that about rural life in Europe, the fact that you just have to be less attached to planning, I would say, and go with the flow.”
Kat: Have there been any moments of panic, a moment when you wondered if you made the right choice?
Jackie: “My moment and it wasn’t really a panic, but I think it was when the enormity of what we had done hit me…
“The fall that we actually moved our stuff over, my college roommate and her husband came to visit, and she and I were walking down the street in the village. She turned to me and she said, ‘can you believe you live here?’ and I thought—‘No, I can’t!’
“Every once in a while now I look around and I think, ‘How lucky I am to be here?’
“We are so glad we had the courage to make the move, because we did have that fear that we were too old for all this…
“We had all the questions that everybody has, you know, are we too old? What about health care? What about, what about, what about. You could sit on the sidelines forever or just give it a go.”
Joel: “And we gave ourselves a five-year option when we bought the house, which was in 2014, a few years before we made the big move. We said, ‘If we don’t like it in five years, we put it up for sale. We go back to life. We had the fling that we wanted to have.’
“So every year on our anniversary day of buying the house, we do a little reassessment.
“At this point we’ve lived here longer than we ever planned to.
“We do live on a hillside, so we have stairs. There may come a time that we’re too old to do the stairs, but even then, we used to say we’d moved back to the States, now we’re saying, ‘Well, maybe we’ll get a condo in Kalamata.’”
Kat: What would you say to somebody who is considering moving abroad in general, or perhaps specifically to Greece?
Joel: “In short, I’d say do it.
“Do your research first of the place. Not just in the summer or when there’s, you know, beautiful weather, but maybe in the winter, or standard advice is rent for a year just to make sure or rent for the entire rest of your life.”
Kat: And is there anything that you would have done differently or wished you’d done differently?
Joel: “Oh, I think I might wish that we’d have done it five years or sooner. We’d have more time here. You know, the time is ticking away.”
Bonne route,
Kat Kalashian
Editor, In Focus: Europe
