It’s not just a student dorm, it’s a lifestyle and not everyone would dare to live it. Cycling in the middle of the night to the most dangerous neighborhood in Utrecht – the Kanalen Eiland, that’s what we do. And the bathrooms…have you seen those? You shouldn’t if you’re an aesthete.
I remember the evening I first got these, I thought “Oh dear God, where am I? Am I back to the Soviet days’ kind of dorm of which I’ve heard stories from my Mom?” The first impression when you come in and see the halls is a bit rough, but the rooms are nice, simple, but nice and we have IKEA just a few streets across so you can make it even nicerJ You can get a double or a single room, depending on what you’ve reserved. I reserved myself a double, which means roommate included, now if you’re as lucky as I am, you would get a nice Finish girl to live with, but I don noit dear to think if you’re not that lucky…
However, now I wouldn’t change Beneluxlaan to anything in the world (well, maybe I would… to something cheaper). But it’s fun! It’s an experience! And I think it’s the people that make it so great! French, Turkish, Canadian, Spanish, Lithuanian, Finish, Dutch… you name it! And the best part is… if we want to smoke shisha in the middle of the night in our corridor we just go and do it, drag our tables and chairs out and have fun together (don’t ask what do we do with the fire alarms, though).
But our favourite place is the ground floor living room. This is our party central as it’s the only social area of a reasonable size. Of course, poor those who live on the ground flour, because it gets lout and crowded, but come on, it’s not that often… After the first big party of this semester we got a few complaints and of course, the housing officer came at 9:00 in the morning to check stuff as he always does on Thursdays and we got busted before cleaning up! But who wakes up at 9:00 in the morning after the party anyway? So then there was some angry emailing between the tenants and the housing officer, but in the end it turned out it wasn’t the mess he was angry about, it was the missing couch… Ahh, the mystery of the missing couch, I mean, it’s a huge couch, how did anyone even manage to take it out of that living room? It turned out later that someone needed a place to sleep and the warm-hearted Beneluxlanders didn’t want to leave the person sleep in the living room, so the couch was transported into one of the rooms… That’s how things are done here. And during the second party, someone called the police, but that’s a whole other story…
And then, of course, there’s footsy. Football in the hall. We all know how much it rains in The Netherlands, but we wouldn’t let that ruin the fun of outdoor games, that become indoor in Beneluxlaan. You can do football, basketball or any other ball game you can imagine in the long, halls of Beneluxlaan (are you still wandering what do we do with those fire alarms?)
So this is how we get along, how we party, live and maybe sometimes even study. And no matter the minuses that Beneluxlaan 924a has, we will always remember it as the place where we had the best days of our lives.
by Ona Budaite
