It was March 23rd when my friend Anraj and I first discussed the idea of heading to Greece. What made it even more surreal was that I had written it down on my dream vision board exactly one year before. Santorini. Athens. Two places I had quietly promised myself I would one day see.
And just like that, the promise of both came true.
I still cannot fully explain what it feels like when a vision board stops being a piece of paper on your wall and starts becoming your actual life. But somewhere between the flight and the landing, it settled in. That version of me who wrote those words down was already planting something. I just had to be patient enough to watch it grow.
When we landed in Athens I did not know what to expect. I had seen the pictures, read the travel guides, scrolled through the Instagram posts. But nothing really prepares you for the feeling of a city that has been alive for thousands of years and somehow still pulses with the most ordinary, beautiful energy. The graffiti pressed up against ancient marble. The smell of olive oil drifting out of open doorways. None of it felt foreign. It felt familiar in the way that certain places do, like your soul has been there before even if your body never has.
That is when I started to understand filoxenia.
The word comes from the Greek. It means love of strangers. But the translation is never quite enough. Filoxenia is not politeness. It is not good customer service or a welcoming smile trained into someone by a hospitality manual. It is something older and more instinctual than that. It is the belief, held somewhere deep and unquestioned, that a stranger who arrives deserves to be treated like family. Not because of what they can offer you. Simply because they are here, and you are here, and that is reason enough.
Greece did not just teach me the word. It gave me the word made flesh, over and over again, in the faces and gestures of the people we met along the way.
Our tour guide in Santorini was the first person who made me truly feel it. He was not reciting a script or moving us efficiently from one landmark to the next. He was telling us stories. Real ones. The kind that make a place feel lived in rather than just photographed. He talked about the island the way someone talks about a person they love, with tenderness and quiet pride.
Without us asking, he started taking photographs of us. Not quick snapshots. He paused. He found angles. He told us to move toward the light, to stand where the view opened up behind us just right. He took his time, the way someone does when they genuinely want you to have something beautiful to remember. This man, whose job was simply to show us around for a few hours, was thinking about our memories. That kind of care is not something you forget easily.
He was not the only one who made us feel that way.
There was a kid working near one of the shops we passed on our first day. We waved, the kind of small instinctive gesture you make without thinking, and kept walking. In a place flooded with tourists every single day, where faces blur together and names mean nothing because everyone is just passing through, he looked at us and said our names the next time he saw us. He remembered. In the simple act of being seen in a place where we were technically just visitors, I felt something open up in my chest that I did not know had been closed.
That feeling followed us everywhere we went.
Later that evening we wandered into a small restaurant with no reservation, two people who did not speak Greek, strangers in every practical sense of the word. The man who greeted us did not treat us that way. He asked where we were from. He told us what to order. He lingered, genuinely happy that we were there. The food came out generous and warm and tasted like someone had been cooking it with love since early that morning.
At the end of the meal he brought out dessert. We had not ordered it. When I reached for my wallet he shook his head. I remember sitting there feeling something I did not expect. The quiet guard I carry without even noticing it just melted. I did not feel like a tourist in a foreign country. I felt like a guest in someone's home. Like someone who had known me for five minutes and had chosen to love me anyway.
That is filoxenia. Not a policy. Not a performance. A way of being in the world that says, you are here now, and that is enough for me to care about you.
I think about what I put on that vision board a year ago. I wanted to see those places. But sitting with it now, I think I was searching for something harder to name. Some proof that the world still holds softness in it. Proof that generosity is not as rare as it sometimes feels. Proof that if you show up somewhere open and willing, people will meet you there.
Greece gave me that proof quietly and without ceremony. In a tour guide who cared about our photographs. In a kid who remembered our names. In a man who fed us dessert because we had come all this way and that meant something to him.
And if I can give even a small piece of what Greece gave me to the people I meet, then I think the vision board was only the beginning of what that trip was always meant to teach me.
Emily Huang
Spring 2026 – GW Exchange - University of Zurich
Fall 2025 – GW Exchange - University of Sydney
Spring 2025 – GW Global Bachelor's Program - Asia-Pacific Semester
Elliott School of International Affairs
International Affairs & Business Double Major
The Global Bachelor’s Program