I'm going to attempt to explain where I'm living this semester in an international student house called Blekerslaan. The city has several international student houses ranging from around 50-300+ people. I chose Blekerslaan because it was relatively close to the city center by the Grote Market which is also near where I will have all of my classes. My house has 53 people in it which is plenty big enough for me. There are 4 floors and the top 3 are where all of the bedrooms are. Almost everybody has their own bedroom and we have a shared bathroom and showers on every floor. It's the first floor where the true excitement happens though. There is one giant shared kitchen that everybody uses that has several stoves and ovens in the middle and everybody has their own cabinet and shared minifridge for food. There is also a common room with a mismash of couches and tables for everybody to eat and socialize. Since I've been here, the first floor has been consistently buzzing with people cooking, eating and socializing. The kitchen always seems to smell like something good that's cooking, unfortunately however, it has never been anything that I've been trying to cook that has emitted such a pleasant aroma. Every night a group of four people is assigned kitchen duty where they have to clean all of the left over dishes in the kitchen and clean off the counters and stoves, and sometime the living room. It takes a good hour to do this and a good 1/2 second for it to be all undone again.
The thing that really seems to make Blekerslaan so great is that there are students here from all over the world. Between this house and other students I've met though intro week, I've met people from countless countries from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Portugal, Spain, France, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Australia, South Korea, and the list goes on and on. The policy with the exchange program here is that, if English isn't your first language, you have to take an English proficiency test to come here to study. There's two universities in the city, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and Hanze University and the people in the house are a mix between the two and are divided up even further depending what faculty they're in.
The majority of the people in the house seem to be from some part of Europe. Some have been here since last semester and a lot of us just arrived a few days ago. Our student manager is the only Dutch person in the house. Regardless of nationality though, everybody communicates in English, unless they get into a conversation with somebody from their home country. It is definitely convenient to be a native English speaker but it's amazing how good everybody's English skills are for them not being native speakers in many cases.
