The start of an adventure

What I like about day -1 is that things can't get any worse than that. Any experience that follows, which in my case was my Erasmus, would automatically be a better one. So when I woke op on day 1, I actually felt good - set aside the shivers running down my spine or the gastric acid moving up my throat. It was the start of an adventure!

As for me, honestly admitted, I never even went through a Day -1-phase. At least not on Day -1. On Day -1, I actually felt quite good, simply because I had been travelling for the past month and had never been home for literally one day. So when I got home from my latest adventure - only 4 days before my departure to Nice, the unfamiliar ritual of unpacking and packing my backs and the unfamiliar feeling of knowing I would not be home for a long time, felt oddly familiar.

In fact, I even felt safe. Safe, because I was going to live in a country I knew rather well, a country I would even want to move to. Safe, because I knew I wasn't going to be alone. Or maybe, I felt safe because, in the middle of my turbulent, chaotic and exciting life, I had found a day or 3 to visit my future destination and make arrangements for my stay. This is my Day -1 - story.

To start my story: I was quite stressed out about this Erasmus. Since I was the first student from my university ever to go to Nice, I had no one to turn to, to ask for help. Although my professors wanted nothing more than to answer my questions, most of them were as much in the dark about this exchange as I was. On top of that, since the contract was concluded only in June, my application for university housing was refused and all other private residences were full.

So my parents and I transformed our home into a call centre and we spent every free afternoon searching the web and stalking Nice landlords as we desperately searched for a student room or studio. Much to my great deception, I began to realise that finding accomodation in Nice was going to be a Sisyphean task.

This mainly due to three reasons: first of all, there were few accomodations left because of the late conclusion of the contract. Secondly, because I was doing an Erasmus programme and thus would only be staying for 4 months and 99% of contracts were for an entire year or at least 9 months. Lastly, because I was a foreigner and could not visit the rooms or meet the landlords in person, so no one was eager to rent me their rooms through the phone.

Thus, we only had one option left: find that 1% of landlords who did want to rent a room for 4 months and ... go and meet them in person. So, in between my work in Malta and Kazou camp in Hungary, my oldies and I went on a real estate shopping spree on the Côte d'Azur (aka the Mecca of  decadent Russians with huge sports cars).

***

We must have been the weirdest tourists when we refused the hotel receptionnist to advise us any beautiful spots and the best tourist attractions in Nice. Instead, we wanted a detailled map showing each and every street and alley of the city. Most of the time, we locked ourselves up in our hotel rooms, ringing up different landlords and making rendez-vous to meet up. They must have thought we had something to do with the Russians maffia, for sure.

It was quite a funny scene. Together, we would sit on the master bed, deciding on the victim who would have to ring up the landlords. Then, we would excitedly watch that person type the number and wait for the phone to ring... By the look on his face, we could already derive what the answer was. Unfortunately, half of the time, a voice would reply that the room had already been taken. So it happened that ,after day 1 of our 3-day stay, we had a terrific number of 4 appointments. C'est l' embarras du choix, qoui!? 

The following day, we looked like we were preparing for a marathon, speedwalking the Nice streets, visiting those 4 rooms. None of them appealed to me, mainly because they were too far away from the bus line that went to the university campus, because there was a house rule forbidding any visitors after 9 pm, or simply because you could only fit into the room if you sucked in your stomach. Disappointed, frustrated and tired, we returned to our hotel. Don't expect a plot twist or a miracle. Desperate as we were, we turned to our last option: real estate agencies.

So it happened that on the very last day, only moments before I had to catch an aeroplane to Belgium and a bus to Hungary, I decided to rent a one-bedroom appartment that we did not even get to visit... Talking about an adventure!





Drop a comment below!