One of the first things new students discover about Delft is its housing shortage. Although the university provides housing for foreign students, many students ultimately decide that they want to find their own accommodation.
This DIY (do-it-yourself) approach to accommodation is certainly challenging, requiring lots of patience and searching, but the rewards are usually worth the effort, resulting in rooms in mixed Dutch-foreign student houses that help to enrich your experience of living and studying abroad.
The Netherlands – as the third most crowded country in Europe per squared meter (after Malta and Monaco) . has no small problem in terms of space and available housing. As a result, finding accommodation in Delft is often one of the biggest challenges (and frustrations) for some students, and a source of great relief when it is done.
There are basically two ways of dealing with this housing hassle: DFY (done-for-you), or DIY (do-it-yourself).
Every incoming foreign student gets the chance to live in a DFY DUWO room, arranged for you before your arrival in the Netherlands. But this comfortable, fully-furnished option also has a lesser side.
For example, opting for a DFY accommodation may mean that you end up getting isolated from the ‘real’ Netherlands in a bubble of a so-called ‘intense Erasmus experience’, where a whole housing complex is full of people from every corner of the world . except the Netherlands.
Of course, this results in a nice friendly environment, with lots of cultural exchange, but it’s in a fake Netherlands, far from any cultural reference besides the weather and the ‘display’ shelves of Dutch toilets. Additionally, there’s the chance of living in a one-person-apartment, where boredom can kill any expectancy of having a funny stay abroad. Only in some cases, one might get a room in a ‘normal’ Dutch student house, such as Jacoba van Beierenlaan, where interaction with Dutch students really happens. In those cases, foreigners get to know more about the Dutch way of living, the culture, habits, local character, etc. In short, all that makes living here different than in our home countries.
‘Chill out’
The second option is the ‘DIY method’, in which students use various techniques to find shelter. The options here include: first, the ‘eternal guest’ technique, which consists of living in a friend’s room for a period ranging anywhere from between one and eight weeks, until you find a room somewhere else (after two months of using this technique, it can also be called the ‘parasite technique’).
A second and most expensive option is staying in a youth hostel for a period of time, while you run stressed out from one ‘instemming‘ to another, trying to get a room playing this game, in which girls and locals have a far greater chance of getting chosen.
The final option, and one less often used, but yet one of the funniest is staying at a Delft campground, where one can literally ‘chill out’ in the open air after a full day of attempts to find a proper room to rent.
This DIY method can be stressing, tiring and frustrating, but the reward of getting a room in a ‘normal’ student house is huge. From the smallest to the biggest, messiest and craziest house, the experience of sharing a year – day by day and ‘koffie na koffie‘ – with people actually from this country is absolutely worthwhile.
Just as there are different kinds of people, so each student house has its own character, and from the moment someone begins living in the house, he belongs to it. And there are some very special houses in Delft. Some gather fraternity students, some just girls, others just boys, some only locals and some only students.
But what would happen if many different types of people would live together? For some people, living together with others is just something temporary due to money problems or student life. For others, living together is a way to share their lives, learn and enjoy being part of another kind of family. A good example of this kind of community is where I live: Bagijnhof 13.
Birthday calendar
Bagijnhof 13 is a (DUWO-managed) communal house in the center of Delft and has a special history and impressive number of residents: thirty-nine people live there in a building that has undergone many changes over the years: built in 1953, the house was formerly a nun’s house, a squat, and nowadays a communal apartment house, where young and middle-aged people, students and graduates, men and women from the Netherlands and other countries, like Italy, Spain, Nigeria and Iceland, have created a special environment where you will experience improvised jam sessions, barbecues, parties, Christmas dinners and normal daily conversations in which people from different backgrounds discuss any topic around the kitchen table.
Living in such a Dutch house also shows how things work here. In this way, a foreigner can discover the advantages of hoovering the dirty water from the floor after moping, learning housemate’s birthdays through the birthday calendar hanging in the WC, or even trying to cook ‘stamppot‘ (a Dutch national dish). Students choosing to live in such a place would also discover that the Dutch language isn’t so difficult and that the extra effort of working out some sentences really pays off in terms of finding out how open the Dutch are to those foreigners who do try to understand them in their own language.
Some people would say that living in such a communal group is a hippie thing, or that it’s too messy or impersonal, and in some ways this is true: people share things, do things together, organize common events and grow their own herbs but the fact is that this kind of living, varied and cosmopolitan, is a perfect way to get immersed in the Dutch way of life and make your ‘Dutch experience’ much more richer.
Bagijnhof 13. (Photo: Sam Rentmeester/FMAX)
The Netherlands – as the third most crowded country in Europe per squared meter (after Malta and Monaco) . has no small problem in terms of space and available housing. As a result, finding accommodation in Delft is often one of the biggest challenges (and frustrations) for some students, and a source of great relief when it is done.
There are basically two ways of dealing with this housing hassle: DFY (done-for-you), or DIY (do-it-yourself).
Every incoming foreign student gets the chance to live in a DFY DUWO room, arranged for you before your arrival in the Netherlands. But this comfortable, fully-furnished option also has a lesser side.
For example, opting for a DFY accommodation may mean that you end up getting isolated from the ‘real’ Netherlands in a bubble of a so-called ‘intense Erasmus experience’, where a whole housing complex is full of people from every corner of the world . except the Netherlands.
Of course, this results in a nice friendly environment, with lots of cultural exchange, but it’s in a fake Netherlands, far from any cultural reference besides the weather and the ‘display’ shelves of Dutch toilets. Additionally, there’s the chance of living in a one-person-apartment, where boredom can kill any expectancy of having a funny stay abroad. Only in some cases, one might get a room in a ‘normal’ Dutch student house, such as Jacoba van Beierenlaan, where interaction with Dutch students really happens. In those cases, foreigners get to know more about the Dutch way of living, the culture, habits, local character, etc. In short, all that makes living here different than in our home countries.
‘Chill out’
The second option is the ‘DIY method’, in which students use various techniques to find shelter. The options here include: first, the ‘eternal guest’ technique, which consists of living in a friend’s room for a period ranging anywhere from between one and eight weeks, until you find a room somewhere else (after two months of using this technique, it can also be called the ‘parasite technique’).
A second and most expensive option is staying in a youth hostel for a period of time, while you run stressed out from one ‘instemming‘ to another, trying to get a room playing this game, in which girls and locals have a far greater chance of getting chosen.
The final option, and one less often used, but yet one of the funniest is staying at a Delft campground, where one can literally ‘chill out’ in the open air after a full day of attempts to find a proper room to rent.
This DIY method can be stressing, tiring and frustrating, but the reward of getting a room in a ‘normal’ student house is huge. From the smallest to the biggest, messiest and craziest house, the experience of sharing a year – day by day and ‘koffie na koffie‘ – with people actually from this country is absolutely worthwhile.
Just as there are different kinds of people, so each student house has its own character, and from the moment someone begins living in the house, he belongs to it. And there are some very special houses in Delft. Some gather fraternity students, some just girls, others just boys, some only locals and some only students.
But what would happen if many different types of people would live together? For some people, living together with others is just something temporary due to money problems or student life. For others, living together is a way to share their lives, learn and enjoy being part of another kind of family. A good example of this kind of community is where I live: Bagijnhof 13.
Birthday calendar
Bagijnhof 13 is a (DUWO-managed) communal house in the center of Delft and has a special history and impressive number of residents: thirty-nine people live there in a building that has undergone many changes over the years: built in 1953, the house was formerly a nun’s house, a squat, and nowadays a communal apartment house, where young and middle-aged people, students and graduates, men and women from the Netherlands and other countries, like Italy, Spain, Nigeria and Iceland, have created a special environment where you will experience improvised jam sessions, barbecues, parties, Christmas dinners and normal daily conversations in which people from different backgrounds discuss any topic around the kitchen table.
Living in such a Dutch house also shows how things work here. In this way, a foreigner can discover the advantages of hoovering the dirty water from the floor after moping, learning housemate’s birthdays through the birthday calendar hanging in the WC, or even trying to cook ‘stamppot‘ (a Dutch national dish). Students choosing to live in such a place would also discover that the Dutch language isn’t so difficult and that the extra effort of working out some sentences really pays off in terms of finding out how open the Dutch are to those foreigners who do try to understand them in their own language.
Some people would say that living in such a communal group is a hippie thing, or that it’s too messy or impersonal, and in some ways this is true: people share things, do things together, organize common events and grow their own herbs but the fact is that this kind of living, varied and cosmopolitan, is a perfect way to get immersed in the Dutch way of life and make your ‘Dutch experience’ much more richer.
Bagijnhof 13. (Photo: Sam Rentmeester/FMAX)
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