Moving to Nijmegen, not knowing anyone and being put together in a flat with three strangers can be difficult. But the international tenants of ‘Muffin 31’ manage just fine.

The Muffins are all here for their master or pre master, so they are not the usual Erasmus students. ‘Going out is just with international students’, says Stefan. Laureline thinks it’s a pity: ‘The international students stick together. You can meet some Dutch people in class, but is difficult to find Dutch friends.’

When you step into the apartment, you are welcomed by a large empty space. The flats for international students are furnished by the SSHN, which means that six chairs, a dining table and three comfortable chairs, which can be transformed into a couch, are all there is. ‘We are lucky to have the canvas of Amsterdam on our wall, because other flats got the train station of Nijmegen, and that’s not very aesthetic’, says Laureline.

‘The name of our flat is Muffin 31, because when we bought a router for our flat we were looking for a new password when we saw Anna eating a muffin’, says Laureline. The flatmates had no voice in choosing their roomies, but they are happy together. There had never been a real dispute. Anna: ‘Just about the bell.’ Laureline: ‘The bell is in the corridor where the bedrooms are. Sometimes people are ringing the bell at four in the morning and we are crying in our beds.’ Anna continues: ‘Most of the time it are just drunk people who ring the bell. But now we know how to shut it off.’ Stefan adds: ‘We discovered it two months after we moved here…’, while the rest is laughing. ‘It was no problem for me, because I fall back asleep in two minutes. For Anna it was difficult though.’ Laureline: ‘The bell is right next to her room.’ / Felix Wagner