Well this is not the boat we used to cruise the Aegean during summer for the simple reason we did not have so much vacation this year. The reason ?
We were after a dream... A dream we had long ago and it is what you see now in your screens...
The whole adventure started 3 years back when I returned from my Erasmus time in Madrid. I had met Cleo before leaving and when I come back she asked me if I want to join as IT specialist an ongoing project about accommodation of Erasmus students in AUEB. It really sounded great so we just used some forms in our old website in order to receive the reservation of that years' students.
We grouped along with Theo and Despina (you will meet here later on). Everything was done on voluntary basis. We had almost no resources, an ESN group hardly existing but we managed to accommodate almost 120 students per year.
As years passed some of us graduated and had to deal with their lives. In the meantime, we had tried to promote our accommodation system with some IT system as a project of the EU but we were not so lucky. We were always thinking that we had something useful and it was something we created and we were sad to leave cause no one wanted to take full responsibility of it.
In our exchange periods we had seen many similar services abroad like www.alunit.net in Madrid. So we came up with the idea... Why not put our system on more professional basis and do what we really like for a living? We were always passionate about exchange and we still are, then we targeted and went for what you see today. We are far from being perfect but perfection is where we aim to go cause we simply like what we do.
We had to overcome an aweful lot of problems in the meantime. Even today we are striggling, it is 01.00am and as you can see we are still at the office. First of all fighting bureaucrasy in August in Greece is a real pain. Bureaucrasy is our enemy and specially in August everyone becomes more lazy (specially public officers) than ever, if they are not on holidays as 95% of greek people are. So we tackled that. Today our server died out. S### (our previous web host) seems that sucks after all so we could not serve the 35-40 connections we had. The stress for me, being the geek, of StayInAthens is huge and it seems I will have to watch out for many days to come...
You see this is the first time that we organised the modest ESN accommodation team into something more professional. We had to start and design everything from the scratch in practically 3 months (when of them being greek august) and i had to quit my previous job back in June in order to build the StayInAthens website.
Ok so you chose Athens and unforunately you faced what a delayed service is, this is usually the rule here but we hoped to be exceptions, well at least we will be for the next semester :)
Please accept our apologies and show compatience specially to the poor geek who has to have our display window (meaning our website) ready and functional...
So please pack some positive energy and be prepared for a life time experience in Κλεινόν Άστυ so be it Glorious City (ok, it was once glorious...) of Athens
Best Regards !
Γεία σας!
Kalo Taxidi (Καλό Ταξίδι) Have a nice trip StayInAthens !
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