Erasmus Adventures - An Unexpected Journey

Today marks the third day I have been officially living in the Netherlands 🇳‍🇱, where I will stay for the better part of 6 months as an exchange student at the University of Twente. It is finally happening after a really long period of planning, stressing, and overall worrying about how things might be.

I had imagined these moments nearly every day this whole summer, thinking it would be all sunshine and rainbows. The reality, however, is more complex. Let me tell you why.

😴 Day 1 - How it all began

The first day started at 3:30 in the morning, after some incredible 1.5 hours of sleep. I was functioning based on pure adrenaline alone. The day before, I was packing all my bags and constantly worrying if I had forgotten something, trying to remember everything essential I had ever used while also trying to stay within the weight limits.

But on flight day, everything was well set up. At around 5 A.M., I arrived at the airport and had more than 2 hours to dispatch all my bags and go through security. That went super well, and we even had some spare time to stroll around the airport, which was weird considering the enormous line formed at check-in (it went almost around the entire airport!).

The flight was an ordinary one, just your standard Ryanair travel, and in around 2 hours, we were in Dutch territory. Sadly, I did not get to taste any airplane food 😔.

🧭 Arriving at our new Home

We landed in Eindhoven, a city a bit far from Enschede (the town where the University is located), and instantly felt that this place was like nothing we had seen before.

The country is super flat, the roads are weirdly marked and reddish in tone, there are brick houses with tall roofs everywhere, and, most striking of all, everyone is a borderline giant here. It is not hard to find kids barely 10 years old already taller than us.

It is fair to say that we experienced a huge culture shock here in a country that, on a global scale, is relatively close to home.

We traveled by train to Hengelo, the city we are staying in, and here we went on foot to explore a bit of the town and see our new home for the first time. Sleep was starting to affect us, but at the same time, the excitement kept us alert.

🏠 An unexpected twist

We met with the landlord and saw our new home for the first time. We were expecting something similar to a student home we see in Porto, adapted to their style, but the reality was very, very different. What he gave us was, essentially, a room with an intense, moldy smell, dirty and stained wooden floor, and no windows that we could open. If we want to circulate air, we must open the door facing the street.

Even worse than that, this room is physically detached from the rest of the house, meaning that, to get to the bathroom or the kitchen, one must first exit the room, go to the street, enter the next door over, and walk into the actual house. Needless to say, we were quite a bit in shock. However, since we still needed a place to sleep, we had no choice.

The first day was rough in that aspect, knowing that this might be a reality we might face for the next 6 months. It was definitely not an easy night. However, we managed to get some sleep, mainly because after nearly 20 hours awake and in travel, we were absolutely exhausted.

🗺 Day 2 - Exploring around

Determined to not settle for this room, we went out to find any possible alternative that we could find in the other city close by, Enschede. This is the biggest of the two towns and where most people find places to stay.

We ventured by bus, and we immediately got to talk with every existing real estate agency we could find. Unfortunately, the reality of the housing crisis here in the Netherlands hit us hard, even considering that this is not that populous of a city. Every agency we talked to either had no rooms left or only did 12-month minimum contracts, meaning that in all the searching we did, we didn’t find a single replacement, suitable or not.

It was not the best of times, indeed, seeing that we probably had to stick with this room. However, in a strange turn of events, our landlord, to whom we spoke to express our discontent, just got the notice that a studio would be free, which gave us hope of a better way. At the time of writing, the situation is in limbo but seems promising.

The best part of the day was definitely lunch and the afternoon, as we got to meet the other guys from our University who were also in Erasmus here. They are all incredibly nice, and I think this makes a really cool group to have a fantastic experience here.

We had lunch together, talked about our journeys here and everything, and then we went to get our bikes together so that we had a more manageable and much cheaper way of traveling the cities. Armed with our new movement devices, we then decided to travel to the campus to explore a bit of where we would spend our days and even quickly visit the F.C. Twente stadium, which is also really close by.

Needless to say, this afternoon really lifted our moods and gave us a much better perspective on life here. Even if the housing conditions weren’t the best, we could rely on everything else to make it unforgettable.

An interesting thing happened at night. We went to Lidl to buy dinner for that day and had the idea to make an exciting dish. We should have first checked what we had to cook with. The moment we got home with all our purchases for dinner and more, we found that we only had a single plate, an old, rusty frying pan, and a few bits of dirty cutlery. Obviously, we ate out that night and planned to have that fixed by the next day.

🍳 Day 3 - Preparing for the days ahead

By the third day, things were starting to look up. We met the really amazing people we would spend our time with, got new hopes for the housing problem, and started to get used to some of the ways things are done here and how to live a comfortable life here.

Also, we had more determination and went to IKEA to fix our kitchen dilemma. However, while strolling through the exhibits, we had the idea that mailing our own cookware from home could be cheaper. We, in fact, confirmed that it was and asked our parents to assemble a small cookware kit and mail it here.

We had a lot of plans for eating healthily here, which were delayed by this setback, so the first few days were definitely not the most nutritious. We intend to compensate for that over time.

🔭 Facing the uncertainty that will come

The common feature between our first days here was definitely the uncertainty they all presented. Each day seemed to have a new surprise for us, good or bad, and forced us to adapt very quickly, which definitely took a toll on us. Nothing seemed certain, trust issues arose, and expectations were crushed during these initial times here.

We remain hopeful for a better future, but for now, some things are just not ideal, and we will have to deal with that. We will stay strong, though, thanks to the amazing group of people we found here. Let the Portuguese Embassy remain strong 🇵‍🇹.