Katerina blogs: Holy Greek Family

I have already been in Netherlands for more than three months now (wow!) which is the longest time I have ever spent abroad. I am sure that all international students reading this will agree on the fact that there are some weak moments when you feel homesick, you miss your parents, you miss your friends back home, and you miss the places where you used to hang out. And for all the above reasons, we all feel eternally grateful to Skype! What an amazing invention!

However, Skype has yet some points of improvement. (Yes!). For example, I may be able to see my parents, but I cannot touch them. I may be able to see what my family has for lunch but I cannot smell it ,etc.I know the last part sounds weird, that is why I have to clarify at this point, that especially during my first weeks here, my parents treated me like a ‘happening’. Instead of the traditional photo frame of the daughter that moved abroad, they had me on Skype almost constantly! For example, my mom was cooking, I could see her cooking; friends would come over for dinner, I was there to greet them! Of course it helps that they have a laptop, so occasionally they would ‘move me’ to the kitchen or the dining room or the living room (thank god we skipped the bathroom!).

So now you have a slight picture of how’s like for a Greek that moves abroad. But alas, Greeks must keep the connection to their roots! This means that for the last two weekends I have been meeting friends and family that came to visit either in Netherlands or in the neighboring Belgium. It was very refreshing and gave me that ‘connection’ I needed with everything I’ve left behind, until Christmas! Which is going to be another round of seeing, touching, hugging, smelling.

[Katerina Petropoulou (25) studies Business Communication and Digital Media at Tilburg University and blogs for Univers.]