A 29-year-old Scottish woman named Jess made a bold decision to leave her home country behind and start fresh in Greece, and she has been refreshingly candid with her TikTok followers about what that experience has actually looked like. The most obvious reason she packed up and moved, she told her audience, was the weather. Scotland is famously gray and damp, and the contrast with the Greek sun was apparently too tempting to pass up. “Sun… who wouldn’t want to live in nice weather for most of the year?” she asked her followers directly, and it is hard to argue with the logic.
Once settled in, Jess found that the sunshine transformed even the most mundane parts of daily life. She described waking up every morning with the certainty that warm weather was waiting outside, though she did acknowledge that the extreme heat waves are a different story altogether. Even laundry became something to appreciate. “The fact that the sun shines about 80 percent of the year means I can wash and dry all my clothes in a single day,” she explained, adding that she hangs everything on her balcony and it is dry within an hour. On top of that, she gets to watch a stunning sunset from that same balcony every evening, which sounds like a reasonable trade for leaving Scotland behind.
Beyond the climate, Jess fell in love with the sense of community that comes with village life in Greece. She spoke warmly about the local celebrations and festivals that bring everyone together in a way that feels genuine and spontaneous. “They celebrate and dance in the street, everyone is cheerful, they drink and sing and turn it into a proper little festival,” she said, describing the atmosphere as something truly beautiful to witness. For someone coming from a different culture, that kind of open communal joy is the sort of thing that makes a new place start to feel like home.
@jesss0422 Part 1 | here are some things i love about living in greece before people start to think i hate it here 🤣 #fyp #livingingreece #relatable #lifeingreece #scottishingreece #realistic #thingsilove ♬ A Thousand Miles – Dj Romulo
Food has been another highlight, with Jess singling out souvlaki as her current favorite local dish. However, her relationship with Greek cuisine is more complicated than it might appear, because she lives with celiac disease, which makes freely exploring the food scene a real challenge. “I would love to say I love Greek food in general, but since I have celiac disease, it is much harder for me to try everything,” she admitted to her followers. She has had to map out restaurants and cafes that offer gluten-free options, and since there are none near where she lives, she makes a point of visiting specialty spots whenever she travels to Athens.
Not everything about expat life has been easy, and Jess has been equally honest about the harder parts. One of the things that affected her most deeply upon arriving was the number of stray animals she encountered on the streets. “The moment I moved there, I immediately fell in love with all the stray dogs,” she said, adding that it breaks her heart knowing they have no home or family. She takes comfort in the fact that animals in Greece are generally well cared for by the community, and she contributes her own small part by feeding them and spending time with them, noting that many of the strays get along wonderfully with her own dog.
Then there are the mosquitoes, which Jess described as a source of genuine frustration. In a second video she shared with her followers, she revealed that she currently had around twenty bites on her body, despite using sprays and creams. “For some reason they just love my Scottish skin,” she joked, finding humor in a situation that is clearly driving her up the wall. The language barrier has also presented its challenges, though Jess is actively studying Greek and is working toward being able to communicate more freely with the people around her. “Sometimes it is difficult to communicate when neither of us actually speaks the other’s language very well,” she acknowledged openly.
Despite the occasional frustrations, Jess closed out her videos with an encouraging message for anyone who is considering making a similar leap. She wants people to know that feeling homesick and choosing to live abroad are not mutually exclusive experiences, and that guilt has no place in that decision. “You are allowed to live in another country and feel nostalgic for home at the same time,” she told her audience, offering a perspective that is both honest and genuinely comforting.
Greece actually has one of the longest life expectancies in the world, a fact researchers have linked to the Mediterranean diet, slow-paced social rituals like the afternoon siesta, and the strong community bonds that Jess herself noticed right away. Celiac disease affects roughly 1 in 100 people worldwide, but it went largely undiagnosed for most of the 20th century because doctors once believed it was almost exclusively a childhood condition. Scotland, for all its rain, averages fewer than 1,500 hours of sunshine per year, compared to parts of Greece that clock in at over 3,000, which means Jess essentially doubled her annual sun exposure by moving.
Have you ever thought about picking up and moving to a completely different country? Share your thoughts in the comments.
