You are going to stay abroad for a long time and you are realizing that getting a hotel or even a hostel can cost a fortune. One of the ideas that may cross your mind is to share a flat with a local. Unfortunately, as many things we can say in an easy way, sometimes it is not that easy to end up with what you wanted, or even end up finding a flat at all!
Let's take a look at how to approach to this situation. You want to share a flat in an expensive area, let's say Stockholm in Sweden for example. In this area the price for a single night at a hostel can be of 60 dollars per person. That's not fair. This is a lot of money just a hostel! We need to find a solution, and the solution you think about is to share a flat. You start looking at different places and you see that some people have a flat with two rooms and one of them is empty, so they offer you the opportunity to join there.
They normally will ask for clean and responsible people and all the typical stuff. Many people look for females because they think they are more tidy. From my experience this is far from true in many occasions, and sex shouldn't be the way to classify a person.
On the other side, you know there are some students that have rooms in the city but are leaving during a certain period of time and want somebody to occupy their room in their absence. That means you will be alone in the room, and the room normally will be like a flat itself, with a bathroom inside, but probably with a shared kitchen at the end of a corridor. In this rooms you will be able to bring more people with you with no problem, such as your family or friends.
Should you share a flat with somebody or get a room for yourself? I will tell you the about an experience I had and you will judge by yourself.
Let's imagine you leave the room for some days to travel to the northern part of Sweden, and you come back after a week at the flat that you are sharing with a female student. When you enter your room, you realize that something has happened inside. Yes, the mattress is on the floor! Has if fallen by itself? Yeah, sure... Something strange has happened also to your pillow. Somebody has changed the cover it used to have... strange... And what about the table? It is dirty and there are 4 glasses smelling wine on it. It seems somebody has been having fun there! It is not exactly what you expected when you thought you were going to share a flat... But there's even more!
You go now to the kitchen and look for your food. Your oil bottle is half empty and when you left it was nearly full and your sugar is not in the place where you usually keep it. It seems it has jumped from the shelve and walked away to the other side of the kitchen. Finally, you browse your things and you can't find the sleeping bag that you used to have inside your room. Absolutely upset, you enter the room of your roommate and you find your sleeping bag there on the floor.
The story ends here and I hope you have placed yourself in it meanwhile. My idea is not to tell you that this is the typical example when you share a flat, but leaving your things with a person you don't know in a flat that belongs to this person gives him or her all the power over you. At same time, this is not any kind of critic to Swedish people, as this person was an immigrant. to Sweden What I want to say in the end, is that the more independent you can be and the less people you involve in a situation, the more luckily things will turn up in the right way.
And after all, with the existence of travel certificates nowadays the price of a 4 or 5 stars hotel can be of just 15 or $20 per person per night, so there is no more need to worry about expensive hotels or about the need to share a flat. The problem is where to find these travel certificates, but I know some places where you could get a good deal.
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