Living in an international house; my experience

Hey all!

This week I am back with a blog post about my experience living in an international house. So, if you are interested in how to find an international house, what it is like living with (a lot of) housemates, and my experience, keep on reading!

First of all, for the people who do not know me yet, I am Fleur van der Neut, a first-year Master of Science for Sustainable Development student from the Netherlands. I’ve been living in Linköping since last August and have lived in two different international houses. My experience in both houses has been quite similar, mostly because of the fact that the houses are next to each other.

Before I came to Linköping, I started looking for accommodation on several websites (there are many blog posts on finding student accommodation already so I will only talk about my personal experience). One of these websites was Facebook. In Scandinavia, a lot of (student) accommodation goes through Facebook. I posted a personal message in one of the many Facebook groups (Lägenheter i Linköping – Öppen grupp to be exact) that I was looking for student accommodation in Linköping. I received a few messages from people who rented out rooms, but I got in touch with one that I liked. I made sure to organize a call with the girls who already lived there to see that it wasn’t a scam and to see if we would connect. After a nice call, I signed a contract with the Landlord and I moved in mid-August. The house was a family house in a very cute area in Ryd. I lived there together with 6 other International girls (from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Bulgaria and Turkey!). Most of the girls already lived there for a year, so they could show me around which was very nice! We had a super nice little garden and I got a big room. We also were lucky enough to have a kitchen with a dining table, a “movie room” in the basement, and 2 bathrooms and 4 toilets. Pretty luxurious for student housing I would say!

Although I really enjoyed living in that house, I decided to move to the neighbor’s house in February. It was time for a change for me and my experience in house nr. 2 has also been very nice so far. It is exactly the same house, just with a different kind of garden en different wallpaper. In this house, I also live with 6 other internationals. In this house, we are German, French and Swedish! So, that is fun as well. If you already have experience living with housemates, this will come as no surprise, but every house has it’s own house dynamics. It differs a lot from house to house. Some things that can be different are; eating together, doing activities together, sharing stuff, cleaning schedules, personal space, etc. It is therefore very important to communicate your preferences clearly with your housemates. It is a pretty wild concept, moving in with 6 complete strangers, but it is also the best thing! You are never alone, it is so easy to make friends in the house, and you get to learn a lot about different people and cultures.

In the new house, we do brunch every Sunday 🙂

I definitely enjoy living with internationals, it never gets boring! I would therefore for sure recommend moving into shared student housing when you are an international moving to Linköping. But make sure you are prepared to give up some of your personal space and maybe you will have to make some compromises when it comes to having a super clean house ;).

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me!

/ Fleur, Master of Science for Sustainable Development

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