“Oriste” means as much as “at your service”, or “may I help you?” It is the equivalent of the French “s’il te plaît”, or the Dutch “asjeblieft”. The English expression “here you are” translates into “Oriste”, but doesn’t do justice to the meaning of its translation. For us it is the ultimate expression of the world-renowned Greek hospitality.

Who we are

“We” are Yvonne and Luc. We got married secretively in 1996 after living together for 14 years. We consider ourselves a bit as vagabonds: although we lived in various houses in various places, and even bought one at one time, we never felt that these houses were “home”. We didn’t put in a lot of effort either to make them feel like “home”.

Yvonne is Dutch, Maastricht was her sort-of “home” town until I dragged her and me across the border to my native country, Belgium, where we lived for 17 years. I’m still surprised that this period in Belgium lasted that long. While she finished her studies in Mental Health Sciences at the University of Maastricht, where she graduated in 1990, I was slaving away in computer departments in various Dutch companies, where I gradually gained some expertise in such fields as software design and development, project management and on to departmental management and advisory functions. Since 1990 Yvonne has held various positions in therapeutic settings as well as management in health care institutions. We hope some of our combined acquired skills will help us build up a new life in any part of the world we chose to live in.

What’s this about?

On a holiday trip to Crete, Greece in 1996 we both fell in love for the second time, this time with the country and its inhabitants. It took 12 more trips in the subsequent 6 years before we decided to take our chances, packed our things and moved them across to Crete. So now we are trying to build ourselves a new life in the warm atmosphere of one of the most enjoyable parts of the world. This site is both a way to return something for everything we have received – and will no doubt receive – from our new friends in Crete and a way to offer those we left behind a peek into our new life. We hope you will enjoy it.

And finally

“Man cannot discover new oceans
unless he has the courage to
lose sight of the shore.”

— André Gide