Valencia Erasmus Report
General informationIn the first semester of this academic year (2018-2019), I did my exchange at Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain.
´ Start date: 11th of September 2018 ´ End date: 21st of January 2019
´ Examination period: January 2019, but I already had a few assignments before the Christmas break.
Study programme Courses at UV
´ Sintaxis Española
´ Dialectología y sociolingüística españolas ´ Diacronía de la lengua española
´ Expresión oral y escrita en el español académico y profesional Courses from RuG
´ Spanish Advanced Proficiency
The Exchange abroad was an obligatory part of my bachelor. At the Universitat de València, I followed four courses of 6 ECTs each and I had to follow one course from the University of Groningen of 6 ECTs, taking 30 ECTs in total. Personally, I found it quite difficult to obtain all credits, but this was mainly because of the choice in courses. I would not recommend
Diacronía de la lengua Española, unless you like a challenge and are quite confident about
your language proficiency. This course included the development of the Spanish language from Latin. I found this quite difficult.
It was easy to find the courses on the website, because all courses of each programme were listed under undergraduate studies. However, when you’re looking for courses, make sure the start date is in the first semester and that the language is castellano and not valenciano, by looking at the teaching guide (or guía docente).
Something that annoyed me was that the enrollment procedure took place after the courses had already started. The idea was probably that you could join the classes in the first week to see if you actually wanted to take the course, but this resulted in some courses being full when it was time to enroll.
In general, the administration was quite different from the organised administration at the University of Groningen. It all seemed a bit less organised, but I feel like that’s part of the Spanish culture as well. Eventhough everything was a bit more chaotic, the level of education seemed similar to the Netherlands.
Before I arrived in Valencia, I got an email about a student mentor. This was very useful and my mentor was very nice. She had a group of about 20 exchange students at the same faculty, which helped to make some contact other students. I really liked this, because I made a few friends in that group. It was also very useful in a practical aspect, because she gave us some useful tips, like tips on transport and places to go.
Finances and daily life Housing (€150 – €400)
I found my room through a website called HousingAnywhere. However, when talked to some Spanish students, I realized that I paid a lot more than they did. There are some Facebook groups for student housing in Valencia, where you can find rooms that cost around 200 euros. Often the prices didn’t include utilities, which were usually about 30-50 euros.
I would recommend finding something around the university street Blasco Ibañez or in the neighbourhood Benimaclet. This is close to the university and a lot of students live in this part and there are a lot of bars here.
Transport
There are different ways of transport in Valencia. ´ Metro
– At the metro stations, you can buy a metrocard at the machine. A returntrip is about 3 euros. If you do this, you get a paper card, keep this! You can recharge this card, so it’s a little bit cheaper if you travel
– However it is cheaper to get a Tuin card. This is a plastic card that you can recharge with money. It’s kind of similar to the Dutch OV card. When
traveling with this card, a single trip within zone A (which is most of Valencia city except for the outskirts) costs 70 cents.
´ Bus
– A single trip can be paid in the bus itself and costs €1,50. There might be a cheaper way, but I didn’t use the bus that often, so I’m not sure how this works.
´ Bike
– Valencia is quite flat, so as a Dutchie, it is perfect to cycle through the city. I was surprised by the amount of bike paths, but sometimes it just ends for no apparent reason. You can find a map of the streets you are allowed to cycle on here: https://www.lovevalencia.com/carril-bici-en-valencia.html.
– You can try to buy a bike, but then you have to find a place to store it safely. This is not always easy. Another option is Valenbisi, a year subscription cost about 29 euros. It is a public bike system, where you can use the bikes for free for 30 minutes if you have a subscription. If you have a metro or bus card, you can put your subscription on this card, otherwise you will get a separate card for this. There are a lot of bike stations in the city, which you can find by simply searching valenbisi on Google Maps. For me, 30 minutes was enough to get where I needed to go. If it wasn’t, you could simply put the bike in a station and get another one. Be careful that you put the bike in correctly and you hear the two beeps! Otherwise you can’t get another bike and the clock keeps ticking.
´ Cabify
– Cabify is a taxi app. It’s usually a bit cheaper than the normal taxis. The costs start at 4 euros, and depend on where you want to go
Cash
If you want to take cash from an ATM, you usually have to pay an extra fee. However, there were some banks where this was not the case. I have an ING bankaccount and I didn’t have to pay extra fees ING, Caixa and Kutxabank ATMs.
Also it is very useful to always have some cash, because there are some places where you cannot pay by card.
Besides this, I would recommend getting a creditcard, because this can be very useful when being abroad and certain online payments
Food
It’s common in Spain to have a hot meal for lunch. At the university, you could get a menu for €6,50. For this price you get a “primer plato”, “Segundo plato”, “postre” and a drink. It is also possible to find restaurants everywhere in the city where you can get a “Menu del día”. In the city centre it’s a bit more expensive than around the university streets. However, it’s almost a 3 course meal for a good price.
For groceries, there are a few supermarket chains, but also a lot of small supermarkets. The biggest chains are Mercadona, Consum and Carrefour. I usually went to Mercadona, which was the cheapest of these three. There are also a Lidl, Aldi and Dia supermarkets.
