What Actually Makes Somewhere Feel Like Home?
A conversation with Nicole Shubalis about belonging, loneliness and building a life in Greece
Moving abroad can look wonderfully simple from the outside.
A different pace of life. Coffee by the sea. Sunshine. Markets. New friendships. A beautiful place slowly becoming your everyday.
But what happens after the initial excitement wears off?
When you no longer feel like a visitor - but don’t quite feel like you belong yet either?
This question comes up in different forms in my work with international expectant and new parents living in Greece.
Pregnancy and early parenthood already reshape our sense of identity and belonging. Add a different healthcare system, another language, family who is thousands of miles away and the challenge of building a new community, and questions such as Where is home? Who are my people? Who can I ask for help? can suddenly feel much bigger.
That is why I wanted to speak to Nicole Shubalis, a Greek-American chef and content creator who left Chicago at 42 to build a new life in Chania, Crete.
Nicole isn't a parent - and this isn't a story about parenting. It is a different blogpost.
It is about something that often sits underneath the experience of parenting abroad:
What does it actually take to belong somewhere that wasn’t originally home?
“I wasn’t choosing Crete. Crete had already chosen me.”
Nicole first came to Chania for her 40th birthday.
While the rest of her family relaxed, she found herself repeatedly slipping away to wander through the old town alone.
The harbour. The architecture. The layers of history. The pace of life.
Something stayed with her.
She returned home to Chicago and, within days, hired an immigration lawyer.
There was no detailed relocation plan yet. Just certainty.
Two summers later, while hiking the Samaria Gorge alone, that feeling became even stronger.
“Somewhere in that canyon, with those walls rising up on either side of me, I started crying for no reason I could name. It wasn’t grief and it wasn’t joy. It was recognition.”
From that point, she says, moving stopped feeling like a decision she was making.
“I wasn’t choosing Crete. Crete had already chosen me, and I was just doing the paperwork to catch up.”
The beautiful life - and everything underneath it
Before moving, Nicole imagined slow mornings, long coffees, markets and the sea.
And some of that turned out to be exactly as she had imagined.
What she hadn't anticipated was everything sitting underneath the postcard version of life abroad. Paperwork. Administrative delays. Rebuilding an income. Starting relationships from scratch. And the strange experience of suddenly feeling less capable in ordinary everyday situations.
She describes Greek bureaucracy as “genuinely humbling”.
After years of running a successful private chef and catering business in Chicago, suddenly even completing an everyday administrative task could require help. And there was another adjustment she hadn't expected.
Nicole had spent nearly 15 years running a business in a culture that rewarded productivity. Sitting over a coffee for two hours initially felt uncomfortable.
“It took months before stillness stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like the actual point.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise, though, was discovering that being warmly welcomed somewhere isn't necessarily the same thing as belonging there.
As Nicole puts it:
“Being liked happens on day one. Being known takes far longer.”
Loving somewhere and belonging somewhere are different things
Nicole makes a distinction I haven't been able to stop thinking about:
“Loving a place is something you do to it. Belonging is something it does back.”
You can adore somewhere almost immediately.
You can photograph it, explore it, learn about it and choose it.
Belonging is slower.
Nicole remembers walking through streets she loved, living the life she'd worked hard to create, and still feeling slightly outside it.
“I’d walk home at night through streets I adored and feel like a guest at a party I’d thrown myself.”
And perhaps that is one of the less-talked-about realities of moving abroad.
You can be grateful for your new life and still feel lonely.
You can know you've made the right decision and still grieve what you left behind.
Nicole describes watching her previous life continue without her: group chats operating in another time zone, milestones she hears about afterwards, events she can no longer attend.
“You’re not homesick exactly, because you don’t want to go back. But you feel yourself becoming a slightly smaller character in a story you used to be central to.”
Grief and certainty, she has learned, can exist at the same time.
The moment Greece began to feel like home
For Nicole, belonging didn't arrive through a dramatic milestone.
It arrived through a neighbour called Roula.
During the summer before Nicole moved permanently to Crete, Roula - a yiayia who lived next door to her Airbnb - had become a familiar face.
On Nicole's final day, Roula came to say goodbye.
She took a bracelet from her own wrist, placed it on Nicole's and held her hand.
They didn't share enough language to explain what the moment meant.
But Nicole understood it.
“I knew in that moment that I wasn’t leaving, I was going back for my things.”
After Nicole moved to Crete permanently, Roula's family invited her to spend Greek Easter with them.
Not as a visitor being politely entertained.
She simply had a place at the family table.
For Nicole, that was the shift.
“That’s when it stopped being a place I’d moved to. Chania had started showing up for me faster than I could show up for it.”
Today, she rents her apartment from Roula's son-in-law.
You don't build a village by trying to build a village
So how do you actually create community somewhere new?
Nicole's answer surprised me.
Repetition.
Rather than actively trying to “make friends”, she began going to the same places at the same times.
The same coffee shop.
The same market stall.
The same gym.
The same stretches of coastline with her paddleboard.
“Familiarity does the work that charm can’t. You become a regular before you become a friend.”
Her CrossFit gym became an important part of her community. So did spending time on the water.
And the friendships that developed weren't built simply on the fact that everyone was an expat.
They grew through shared interests and repeatedly being in the same spaces.
“I didn’t go anywhere in order to meet people. I went because I genuinely wanted to be there, and then I kept going.”
She also found international WhatsApp and Facebook communities more useful than expected.
Yes, because someone inevitably knows which office to visit or has already solved the bureaucratic problem you're currently facing.
But also because there is something powerful about hearing:
Me too.
Knowing that somebody else has struggled with the same system, felt the same frustration or cried after the same sort of difficult day can make an unfamiliar place feel considerably less lonely.
“English gets you service. Greek gets you relationships.”
Learning the language has been another important part of Nicole's journey.
She describes herself as very much still learning Greek, but says it has probably done more for her sense of belonging than anything else.
Her observation is simple:
“English gets you service, but Greek gets you relationships.”
People can be kind and helpful when she speaks English.
But when she attempts Greek - imperfect grammar and all - the interaction changes.
People correct her. Laugh with her. Slow down.
Nicole has come to see being corrected as an act of inclusion.
“You don’t bother teaching a tourist.”
Learning another language also requires accepting that, for a while, you won't be able to express the full version of yourself.
Nicole makes her living communicating in English.
In Greek, she says, she can feel like a toddler.
That vulnerability is part of belonging too.
What Greek life taught her about community
One of the biggest cultural shifts Nicole has noticed is how differently connection happens.
In the US, she says, relationships often happen through appointments. You find an available time. You arrange something.You put it in the calendar.
In Greece, connection frequently happens in the spaces between plans. Someone stops. A conversation starts. Nobody is rushing to make it productive.
“The lack of efficiency is the relationship.”
Hospitality feels different too, especially for someone who spent 15 years cooking professionally. Offering food isn't simply good manners. It communicates something about who you are and the relationship you're creating. Sometimes, she says, good bread, tomatoes and olive oil put on the table for someone you care about really are enough.
The part nobody warns you about: month four
When I asked Nicole what she wished somebody had told her before moving abroad, her answer wasn't about paperwork, banking or finding accommodation.
It was:
“The hardest part isn’t leaving, it’s month four.”
We prepare ourselves for the move. For the logistics. For the goodbyes. And then the adrenaline disappears. The novelty begins to fade. The difficult administrative pieces are still there.
But your new life hasn't developed enough history yet to feel completely yours.
You're somewhere between two lives.
Nicole calls it the gap.
And her advice is important:
“It’s a phase, not a verdict.”
Feeling lonely doesn't mean the move was a mistake. Missing your old life doesn't mean you should return to it. And loving your new home doesn't require pretending every part of leaving was easy.
You cannot manufacture history
For anyone who loves living abroad but occasionally wonders why they still feel like an outsider, Nicole offers another helpful reframe:
“Loneliness abroad isn’t a sign of a bad decision. It’s the sensation of not yet having history somewhere.”
And history can't be rushed.
You accumulate it.
The same street.
The same café.
The person who starts recognising you.
Someone learning your name.
Small conversations turning into familiar ones.
A place knowing your usual order.
Eventually, without necessarily noticing when it happened, you're no longer observing the community.
You're inside it.
Why this matters when you're becoming a parent abroad
Nicole's story isn't about pregnancy or parenthood. But so much of what she describes is familiar to the international parents I meet through Parent Path.
Because when you're preparing to have a baby away from your original home, you may be navigating two enormous transitions at once.
You're becoming a parent.
And you're doing it inside a system, culture or community that may still feel unfamiliar.
Suddenly the questions of belonging become practical:
Who do I ask when I don't understand how something works?
Who can explain the system without making me feel silly for not knowing?
Who could I call after the baby arrives?
Where do I find other parents whose families also live thousands of miles away?
Where is my village?
One of the reasons I created Parent Path was precisely because information alone doesn't answer all of those questions.
Sometimes what makes the greatest difference is simply finding people who understand the experience you're having.
Nicole's advice about community feels particularly relevant here:
Don't wait until you desperately need a village to start building one.
Keep showing up.
Go back to the same places.
Say hello again.
Join the WhatsApp group.
Have the coffee.
Attend the parent meet-up even when you don't know anybody yet.
Let familiarity slowly do its work.
So what makes somewhere feel like home?
Nicole's definition has changed. Home used to mean an address and the people inside it. Now, she says:
“It means being recognized - by a landscape, by a community, and by myself.”
And perhaps belonging doesn't arrive with the paperwork, the perfect Greek sentence or the moment every logistical part of your move is finally finished.
Perhaps it arrives much more quietly.
Nicole puts it beautifully:
“You begin to belong somewhere when you stop narrating it.”
When the beautiful harbour is simply the route home.
When someone asks you for directions.
When familiar faces stop feeling like strangers.
When you're no longer thinking constantly about the fact that you moved somewhere.
You're simply living there…
About Nicole
Nicole Shubalis is a Greek-American chef and content creator living in Crete, Greece. After more than 15 years running her own private chef and catering business, she left Chicago in 2026 to build a life in the place her family came from.
She now writes and creates content about relocation, Greek identity and what it actually takes to belong somewhere.
She lives in Chania with her dog Bubba and her cat Athena.
You can find Nicole on Instagram at @nicole_shubalis, visit www.nicoleshubalis.com, read her article about moving abroad or read her Moving Abroad Guide if you're considering building a life somewhere new.
Are you preparing for parenthood in Greece?
If you're pregnant or navigating life with a new baby in Greece and sometimes feel as though you're figuring out parenthood and a new system at the same time, Parent Path was created for you.
It's a space to understand your options, ask the questions you don't know who else to ask and connect with other parents who understand what it means to build a village away from home.
Because becoming a parent far from home doesn't mean you have to figure it all out alone.
Explore Parent Path support, join one of our community meet-ups, or simply come and say hello on Instagram at @parentpath.
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