Foreign Nationals - Local Knowledge

[Muttly]

According to some of the litrature I have been reading the tourists using Crete for holidays are mainly Germans, Scandanavians and British in that order. Funnily enough that is no change from the 1970 and 80's where the people I met fell very much into those catagories. Many Germans had large caravans and motor homes whereas the Scandanavians mostly tents.

The distribution in hotels and pensions was very much the same. In fact in many areas it was difficult to find an English voice. Those that did have tended to be back packers like myself, we seemed to be bottom of the financial pecking order.

As for residents, what is the national distribution. For example Russians are becoming more numerous are they in evidence. Plainly there are other eastern European nationals. Italy is getting more people from Romainia and Albania as there are still parts of S.Italy that speak versions of the language.

So who is landing in Greece or more particularly Crete? Whereas Italy, Malta and Gibraltar are feeling the force of the exedous from Africa is there any knock-on effect in Crete? Problems in the middle east have caused many Lebanese citizens to take up residence in Cyprus. Is there any outflowing from there?

[andheath]

It's terrible. Stay in Devon.

[Muttly]

It's terrible. Stay in Devon.

We'd love to but Mrs Muttly and me are the only British Citizens they are actually going to deport. So we got to end up somewhere!

[carolineclaire]

there are 2 aspects here....the tourism side as well as the nationalities coming to live and work here.

As far as tourism goes, the major european countries continue to bring the majority ie brits, germans, scandanvians and dutch.

However, every nationality is represented here these days with this season seeing an increase from Russia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Serbia, Poland and Hungary. But these nationalities tend to have a shorter season and tighter budgets ie 3 months compared to the rest that provide business for 5/6 months. Is difficult for the local businesses who are used to working for a good 6 months, whereas now they probably just have a really good 3/4 months to make income for the 12 months but unfortunately thats how things are going and you have to accept and make the most of it, hoping that it will develop in the future.

The americans, japanese, spanish tend to just come in on the cruises and spend the day here at Knossos etc and concentrate more on Athens and Santorini.

In terms of nationalities coming to live and work here, the greek government does not make it easy just to turn up here, not UK bashing but is a different ballgame here.... and whilst we have Albanians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Chinese etc, they know they have to work hard and pay their stamps etc , nothing is for free, as well as face day to day hardships as ' foreigners' as well as certain amount of racism- they seem to be automatically blamed for things when not necessasily so - have witnessed a few unfair experiences of this but probably thats the same everywhere.