Bastard's Thoughts

After a good amount of driving around Europe, I am somewhat settled in.

By settled in I mean me and Jordan rented a place somewhere here. Gulnare is a decent place to stay in for a few days before finding an apartment ( or if you are on holiday ) . The double rooms are 500KR(66E)/day, and although they are a little bit cramped, they make up for it with the free internet, shared (clean) kitchen, terrace and general friendly atmosphere. Anyway the other possibility was a cardboard box ( witch we will be using starting next week if we don’t find a place to stay )
I dunno, perhaps it would be better like this, nice skylight, water whenever it rains, a nice warm beach view, etc.

Ok so this is the first INFO post i’m making ( Jordan is writing about her life with the Danes, I’ll prolly link to her later for a more complex info stream )

I’m doing this in the hopes that any other poor sap that has trouble finding out info would benefit from these short listings

SO here goes :

1) Housing

Being a newcomer/student in Aarhus ( ASB ) I’ve signed up on the studenthousinginaarhus website. To be quite honest it’s not the best system i’ve seen so far and you need a lot of luck to get a house where you want ( not to mention WHEN you want it ) The website is http://www.ungdomsboligaarhus.dk/ ( use google language tools ) .

The system here ( not only for this website, but for all the housing associations  ) is like this : You make an account, find your dream-house, then enter a queue for 234983242 days. When u get down on the first 10 places you start getting offers ( in theory ) In practice, me and Jordan are on 3rd place for 2-3 months now and still no offer. I’ll be paying them a visit tomorrow and fill in this post with WHAT they did after seeing my face

Anyway, you get in the queue and nicely wait your turn. The problem here is that the influx of students is quite large and the number of graduates that chose to stay here after classes is even larger BUT the number of apartments is limited so… we’ll just see how it goes.

Other nice/interesting websites for housing are

http://www.aarhusbolig.dk/

http://boligfinder.dk/

http://boligbasen.dk/

http://bolig-ad.dk/indeks/links_lejebolig20050921.htm

http://www.aarhusbo.dk/hjemmeside/

http://www.boligportal.dk/

If you DO decide to come here and study you should use these websites a.s.a.p. The waiting lists are HUGE.

Price-wise, a nice two-room apartment ( 60-70 sqm ) is like 4000KR ( 550E ) per month and this includes water/heating/cable tv and internet.

EDIT : ALSO – you can visit them and talk live BUT be careful – their working hours are like mon-thursday 10:00- 14:00. FRIDAY OFF ( WTF )

2) Jobs

This is, again, a touchy subject.

Due to the influx of foreigners the job market for students is pretty much like this :

Women – cleaning

Men – Newspapers ( there sure are a lot of newspapers to deliver here, right ? )

So as I was telling Jordan, this will be a great career move for me – IT manager in a multinational company to paperboy in a danish town . WORTH IT.

The idea with getting a job is that you have to have some sort of recommendation from somebody that already works there. that way you will get hired for the low level jobs.

For the high level jobs, well, first of all you HAVE TO KNOW DANISH. ( will cover that later )

3) Prices

This depends a lot on where you want to go and what you want to buy. If you wanna get, say, drunk, then you are better of doing it home ( or drinking petrol )

For drinks…well asb/au have the Klubben where beer is a bit less expensive (2-4E) but if you wanna go out somewhere you will get rid of 60KR (8E ) / beer SO MAKE IT COUNT.

Food, on the other hand, is pretty ok priced. You have cheep supermarkets ( lidl / netto ), normal (fakta ) and expensive ones. Mostly everything is closed on sunday ( besides one or two places ) but you can do your shopping during the week.Every day has a new discount ( that is also available for cloths – you can walk down the commercial avenue each day and find different discounts on different products ) .
If you don’t mind going all hawk-eyed and ninja-ing a product from an helpless old lady that JUST HAD TO HAVE THE LAST ONE, then you should be ok.

4) Weather

Mixture between cold rain and nice warmth. The average so far was about 20degrees . You can see people everywhere (and mind you this is AUGUST ) having short sleeved shirts and a rain jacket tied to their bikes . So the thing here is always be prepared for when it rains. Comparing to Romania, for instance, this place is like an icebox ) ( 45degrees in bucharest, wtf ?)
Mostly you will end up dressing in full rubber clothing and be made a mockery of when getting to any public place BUT AT LEAST YOU WILL BE DRY. ( Jordan thinks she can find a bathroom and quickly change before anybody sees her….and I’ve got a car :> )

5) Public transportation

You can get around from everywhere to everywhere via the bus systems. It costs about 20KR for a trip OR you can get a ticket for one month on 350KR . People here don’t encourage cars..they use them but not that much. Instead they use bikes a lot. ( Every first Wednesday of the month the police is auctioning second-hand bikes http://www.1-auktion.dk/ ) The only bad thing about them is that they ARE IN DANISH so you could end up buying a broken down bike with 1000KR

Parking is free from 19 to 9 in the morning and taxed with 15KR/h otherwise. You can also find parking places that allow you to stay there for 1-2hours. The main thing about this is that YOU MUST HAVE a car clock. It’s all very trusting in here and people seldom take advantage of this.

6) CPR Number – The resident permit/cpr number and all the formalities take up to two weeks ( starting soon on it – will let you know )

I’ve also added an .xslx with the current OK housing ( from ungdombolig ) with a normal waiting list. Price ranges are 3000-5000KR, relatively centered – 2 person apartments

Will update them as I find out more info
UPDATE 2:
I went to 4 housing agencies today and it looks like there is NO 2 room apartment free in all of aarhus. Will continue my hunt tomorrow.

ALSO i went to the student housing in aarhus HQ and met a nice young lady that was so good as to NOT HELP ME AT ALL. When I told her that I’m on the queue since NOVEMBER she just replied that she doesn’t know when i’ll get a house and that my guess is as good as anybodies. GG.
I payed about 500KR for access on bolig basen and got nothing yet but…i’m still hoping

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Aarhus, Life in .dk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.