The apartment, Ayia Paraskevi, Greece.

Made a recycling area in our apartment and now all of my roommates use it as well!

So far the language barrier hasn't dominated my time here. A ton of people speak English, or I can use hand signals to explain what I want to say. One time that this was not the case was my search for lactose-free milk. After searching 2 stores and failing I spent 20 minutes reading labels in the 3rd. None of the words made any sense until finally I came across the words "free-lact" and I went with it. More likely than not it is the kind of milk I wanted, but then again I cannot read the labels to be sure.

Another big time consumer was laundry detergent. The clean, fresh scent led me to the correct isle, and the shape of the bottles gave away which section I wanted to be in. What my senses could not help me with was determining laundry detergent from fabric softener. After 30 minutes of browsing labels with my roommate Brianne, I came across some words in French, of which I happened to know a couple, and it revealed that we were looking at softener. We bought a bottle from the shelf below, hoping it would be detergent. After arriving back at the dorms we asked a Greek-speaker who confirmed it was what we wanted. Learning to turn on the Greek washing machines was a whole other story....