This summer, I had the opportunity to study abroad with the College of Charleston’s Communication department in the beautiful metropolis of Athens, Greece. As someone who has never been out of the country, I knew that I would experience cultural shock, however the bustling nature of a sprawling city like Athens added a layer of comfortability that was similar to US cities like New York City, a city I have visited often before, which made it easier to adjust to Greek lifestyle after my initial culture shock, Today in the blog post, I will be talking about the cultural differences between Greece and the States that I learned by examining the Greek’s health, lifestyle, and diet throughout the first leg of my study abroad trip.
For starters, meals in Athens are slower than in the states. What I mean by this is that in the states, we are used to getting our meals, eating, and getting the bill to leave within less than an hour of getting to the restaurant.
However, in Greece meals are meant to be enjoyed and not rushed like how we do in the United States. Each meal comes out slower, ensuring you that the food was made fresh and wasn’t just heated up in the back. Meals typically took 2-3 hours and were a great way to sit down and connect with my peers on a more personable level.
Continuing with cultural differences in the restaurant industry, it was also typical to get the bill at the end of a meal put altogether on a single check instead of separate bills for what each person ordered. For my friends and I, this was a big cultural shock upon our first experience in a local Greek restaurant due to our bill being a couple hundred euros for the ten of us. However, we learned to adjust and figured it was simpler to have one person pay for the bill and we all pay them back.
Coming from a society that runs on debit and credit cards, it was hard to learn that most places ran on cold, hard euros rather than card. My peers and I had to make it a habit of grabbing some euros every morning at the atm, otherwise we may be stuck in a situation where we couldn’t pay for what we ordered due to the fact they only accept euros and not card.
In terms of their language, Greek is one of the most beautiful and romantic languages in the entire world. Where in the United States we expect everyone to speak English, Greek people are forced to learn English to keep up with the rest of the world. So while I did not run into difficulty in terms of the locals not understanding me, I did make it my mission to learn some words in their language to use in my daily activities. This is something that Greeks appreciate. A simple word like “efharisto,” which means thank you in Greek, was something I would use often when getting coffee in the morning. Often greeted with a cheery “Parakalo,” which means your welcome, I could tell that the locals appreciated that I picked up some words in their language to show them that I appreciate the beauty of their culture and that I was not just a naive tourist.