As far as housing, the only thing I can complain about so far is the size of my refrigerator, and since I’ve already done that in a previous post, we’ll get on with it.
I got on the wait list for the student apartments last August or September, mostly out of boredom and curiosity on a slow day in Brazil. At the time I was only just starting to toy with the idea of coming here, and it was a maybe-someday thing, surely not before 2011 or 12.
Only problem was, you had to go back to the site and renew every month to keep your place in line, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what name I could have possibly registered under, until I realized that “nom” means last name, and is quite often placed before the “prenom” which means, literally, "pre-name," and should logically therefore go before the "name," but nobody asked me. I eventually figured it out and got back in line, but I was afraid it was too little too late.
The student housing website announced in June that they were completely full until the end of 2010, and after a few panicked weeks of emailing people advertising expensive and inconvenient rooms and getting no responses other than the rooms were no longer available, I was about to give up on the idea of coming at all. And then, in late July, as if by magic, I got an email from the student housing foundation asking if I wanted a room in a five bedroom, furnished apartment, a block from the lake, a twenty-minute walk to the center of town, with a kitchen and two bathrooms, internet and utilities included and with the cheapest rent I had seen in Lausanne.
Yes. Yes, I did.
I was lucky to get an apartment at all. I was lucky that it’s much nicer and, refrigerator excepted, bigger than I had expected. Although the lease specifically says dishes aer not included, past tenants have left the place well-stocked. We even have a lettuce spinner. What college student needs a lettuce spinner?! We also have two couches so I’m excepting visitors. And I got lucky with my roommates. For one thing, it’s 2:3 girls:guys, which means I only have to share my bathroom with one other person, and it’s actually two separate rooms (toilet+sink and shower+sink), which is quite convenient. For another, we speak French since three of the four are native speakers (a guy from Paris of Tunisian origin, a girl from just across the boarder from Geneva in France, and a guy from a small town in French-speaking Switzerland), and the fourth (from Italy) speaks French almost as well as he speaks English. Oh, and they’re all pretty cool people too.
It seems that most Swiss studying in Switzerland tend to live at home and commute to the nearest university, so the student housing is almost exclusively international students and often a very diverse mix of nationalities. A more typical situation is that of a Mexican guy I met the other day (through a Spaniard that I had met earlier that day doing laundry), who shares an apartment with students from Iran, Serbia and Madagascar. While I love meeting people from all corners of the world, the downside is that the common language is almost always English, since chances are their English is better than their French and they might not even speak or need to learn French at all, especially the students in the sciency programs. This way I still get to meet people from all over in other apartments in my building (doing laundry, for example), but still spend most of my day speaking French.
And did I mention I’m a block away from the lake? :)
No comments:
Post a Comment