How to settle into a new city as an international student: the first 30 days (2026)

📌 TL;DR The first 30 days as an international student run on two parallel tracks: admin that has to get done, and social connection that has to be built. Both feel harder than you expect. Sort the admin in week one: register your address, open a bank account (Revolut or Wise before you fly, N26 once you arrive), get a local SIM card, find your faculty building. Build the social side from day one: go to your ESN orientation, say yes to everything for the first two weeks, find one regular activity (gym, society, language exchange) that gives you weekly contact with the same faces. By day 30 you won't feel fully at home, but you'll have a route to university, a few people you'd message on a Friday, and the admin done so it's not hanging over you. That's what settling in actually looks like.

Most student housing content stops when the keys are in your hand. This one starts there.

You've landed. The bags are unpacked. The Wi-Fi works. Now what?

The first month abroad is the one that quietly decides whether the rest of your stay goes well. Students who set up the admin and the social side properly in the first 30 days have a measurably better semester than the ones who try to do it later. The admin keeps piling up if you ignore it. The social side gets harder if you wait, because the easy windows (orientation week, the first ESN events) only happen once.

Here's how to use the first month deliberately, in roughly the right order.

Week 1: the admin that unlocks everything else

Get your address registered before you do anything else. In most European countries, registering your address with the local municipality is a legal requirement, and the foundation for almost every other piece of admin you'll need. You often can't open a bank account, get a student card, or access certain healthcare services without it.

Every country calls it something different.

A note on co-living and registration. Operators like Fuse Stays and other student-focused co-living buildings typically support residents through the registration process: they provide the landlord paperwork in the right format, sometimes book the appointment slot, and answer questions in English. In a private rental from an individual landlord, you'll often need to chase the landlord for the right forms, translated correctly, while the deadline is ticking. If you're booking housing from another country and registration anxiety is part of the calculation, this is a real and underrated argument for co-living.

For the full picture of how co-living removes friction across the housing process, see our co-living for students guide.

Week 1, continued: bank account 🏦

Open a bank account in week one, ideally with one set up before you flew. Your home country bank will hit you with €3 to €5 per ATM withdrawal and 2% to 3% currency conversion fees on every transaction. Over a semester that's €100 to €300 in fees you don't need to pay.

Two things matter: getting a card that doesn't bleed you dry on foreign fees, and (in some countries) having a local IBAN for rent and utilities.

Practical setup:

1. Open Revolut or Wise before you fly. Card delivery takes 7 to 10 days.
2. Once you arrive and have your address registered, open N26 if you need a local IBAN for rent or utilities.
3. Keep your home country bank account open. Your Erasmus grant or family transfers usually go to your home IBAN.
4. Move money from your home account to Revolut/Wise and spend from there. Keep a small emergency buffer in the home account.

Some local bank accounts (real bricks-and-mortar ones like ING, Deutsche Bank, OTP) require proof of address before they'll let you open an account. This is one more reason to register your address in week one, not week three.

Week 1, continued: SIM card 📱

Get a local SIM in the first week if you're staying more than 3 months. EU roaming rules mean your home SIM works across Europe with no extra charge, but most home plans have data caps that drain fast when you're using maps, translation apps, and ride-hail services daily. After 4 months of continuous use abroad, operators can also charge "fair use" surcharges.

A local prepaid SIM takes twenty minutes and costs almost nothing.

Quick reference for the two cities where Fuse operates:

• Budapest: Yettel, Telekom, Vodafone Hungary. Around HUF 4,000 to 6,000 (€10 to €15) for 20GB to 30GB prepaid. Sign up in person with your passport at any phone shop.
• Riga: LMT, Tele2, Bite. Around €10 to €15 for 15GB to 30GB prepaid. Available at supermarkets, kiosks, and operator stores.

The broader pattern is the same everywhere in Europe: prepaid SIMs from the big three national operators, €10 to €20 a month, no contract, no commitment, refill via app. Spain has Yoigo and Vodafone prepaid, Germany has Aldi Talk and Lidl Connect, Italy has ho. Mobile and Iliad. The specifics change, the process doesn't.

eSIMs (Holafly, Airalo) work for the first few days. After that, a physical local SIM is cheaper for the rest of your stay.

Week 2: the practical stuff nobody tells you

By week two the urgent admin is sorted. Now the texture of daily life starts to take shape, and this is where small bits of local knowledge save you weeks of feeling lost.

The supermarkets in most European cities sit in a tier system, and which one you shop at quietly shapes your monthly food bill. Lidl, Aldi, Penny, Biedronka, Mercadona, Dia: budget tier, where students actually shop. Carrefour, Tesco, Albert Heijn, Edeka, Rewe: mid-tier, fine for most things. Spar Gourmet, Whole Foods, Marqt, anything with "organic" in the name: expensive, occasional, not your weekly shop. Pick a budget supermarket within walking distance of your flat and make that your default. Save the mid-tier for things the budget chain doesn't stock.

Loading a transit card is something every city does slightly differently, and figuring it out on day one with a queue of locals behind you at a ticket machine is unpleasant. Do it once with your phone open to a tutorial. In Budapest, the BKK app handles everything, with a student monthly pass at HUF 3,450 (€11), the best deal in any EU capital. In Riga, the e-talons card from Rīgas satiksme. In Berlin, the BVG app with a Deutschlandticket if you're staying longer than a month (€58/month, valid on every regional train in Germany). Buy from the app, not the kiosk. Apps remember your details.

The nearest pharmacy matters more than you think. Note where it is, what its hours are, and which one has English-speaking staff. In most European countries pharmacists handle a lot of what you'd see a GP for at home (cold and flu, minor cuts, simple prescriptions). Same goes for a 24-hour pharmacy somewhere in your city. Find it before you need it.

Tipping culture varies and getting it wrong is awkward. Quick rule of thumb: 10% in sit-down restaurants is standard across most of Europe. Round up the bill in cafés and bars. Taxis and rides: round up. Hairdressers and barbers: 10% if you're happy with the cut. Hotels: €1 to €2 for housekeeping if you're staying multiple nights. In Eastern Europe (Hungary, Latvia, Poland), 10% is generous and appreciated. In the Netherlands and Germany, it's more transactional and rounding up is fine.

Which neighbourhoods are actually worth your time. The ones that look good on Instagram and the ones that are actually nice to live in are not the same neighbourhoods. Ask the locals at orientation, ask your flatmates, ask anyone working in a café who looks roughly your age. The honest answers are different from the tourist-board answers. Walk the city in the first two weeks. Some areas will feel right immediately, some won't, and you can't tell which is which from Google Maps.

Week 2, continued: university admin 🎓

This is the part that's most specific to your university, so the broad strokes only:

• Student card pickup. Your faculty's international office handles this. The card unlocks library access, public transport discounts, cafeteria pricing, museum entry, and proof of student status for everything else. Get it in the first week.
• Module registration. Confirm your course selection with your home university's coordinator and your host university's exchange office. Mistakes here are painful to undo later.
• Find your faculty building. Walk to it once before your first class. Sounds obvious, you'll skip it, you'll regret it on day one.
• Grading system. If your host country uses a different grading scale (1-10 in the Netherlands, 4-1 in Germany where 1 is highest, ECTS letter grades), check how it converts back to your home transcript. Your home international office handles the conversion.

Your university's international office is the right resource for everything in this section. It's their job. Use them.

Weeks 2 to 4: the part that actually matters most 🤝

Here's the honest version: most international students don't struggle with the admin. They struggle with the social side. The first two weeks before you've found your people are the hardest part of the whole semester for most students, and the standard advice ("just put yourself out there") is genuinely useless when you don't know anyone and you're tired and the city feels foreign.

What actually works, in roughly the right order:

Go to your ESN orientation. ESN (Erasmus Student Network) runs welcome events, orientation weeks, city tours, language exchanges, and partner discounts at almost every Erasmus host university in Europe. It's free to join (sometimes a €5 to €15 one-time card fee that pays for itself on your first Ryanair flight). The orientation is where most international students meet most of their semester's friends. Don't skip it. The single biggest predictor of how socially well a student's exchange goes is whether they attended ESN orientation in the first week.

Say yes for the first two weeks, then start choosing. In the first fortnight, accept every invitation that doesn't actively conflict with something else. Coffee with a flatmate, a random ESN trip, a language exchange you don't really care about. After fortnight one you'll have a rough sense of which people and activities you actually like, and you can start filtering.

Find one weekly anchor. A gym, a society, a regular language exchange, a sports club, a volunteer thing. Something where the same group of people show up on the same day every week. Repetition is what turns "people I've met" into "friends", and a one-off ESN trip doesn't give you that. A weekly thing does.

Look for the university buddy programme. Most host universities pair incoming exchange students with a local "buddy" who knows the city, the bureaucracy, and the social scene. Sometimes it's run by the international office, sometimes by ESN, sometimes by student associations. Sign up if it exists. Free local guide.

The role housing plays in this. This is where the housing decision you made two months ago quietly shapes how easy or hard your first month is.

Students living alone in a private studio have to construct a social environment from scratch. Every coffee, every dinner, every "let's hang out" requires planning, messaging, and effort. Students living in shared flats with random flatmates from the same city often end up with people they don't naturally click with, and the kitchen feels awkward rather than social.

Students in co-living tend to meet people passively. The communal spaces and shared living already create the conditions for connection. You bump into someone making pasta at 9pm, you end up at the same rooftop on a Friday, you join the building's WhatsApp group and discover three people are going to the same gig. The model is designed around the fact that international students need a built-in social environment, not a private apartment.

Fuse Stays is the operator whose model is built explicitly around this. Their buildings run resident events, common areas designed for hanging out (not just functional kitchens), and a community of students from different countries who all moved in around the same time. For an international student arriving alone in a new city, the social environment is part of the product, not an accident. If you've already booked private housing and don't have this, you'll need to be more deliberate about building connections (ESN, weekly anchors, saying yes for the first two weeks). If you can still choose, factor the social side in.

For city-specific co-living options, see our guides on the top 5 student housing providers in Budapest and top 5 student housing options in Riga.

By the end of month one: what settling in actually looks like

You won't feel fully at home in 30 days. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you they did is either lying or they didn't try anything new.

What you should feel by day 30:

• Oriented. You know your route to university, the nearest supermarket, where the pharmacy is, how to load the transit card. The city has stopped feeling like a place you're visiting and started feeling like one you live in.
• Admin done. Address registered, bank set up, SIM working, student card collected, modules confirmed. None of this is hanging over you.
• A few people you'd message on a Friday. Not your closest friends, not yet. But a small group where you can plan something without it feeling forced.
• One weekly thing. A gym, a society, a language exchange. Something that gives you regular contact with the same people.
• A short list of places you like. A café where you study, a bar you've been to twice, a park you've walked through, a neighbourhood that feels right.

This is what "settled" looks like at day 30. Not loving every minute. Not best friends with everyone. Just oriented, the basics handled, the social foundation laid.

Settling in is a process, not a moment. If you're not loving the first week, that's normal. If you're not loving the first month, that's still normal. The students who end up loving their stay are usually the ones who did the admin in week one, said yes for the first two weeks, and found one weekly anchor by week three. That's the recipe.

For the wider picture of how Erasmus housing, grants, EHIC, and first-month admin fit together, see our Erasmus 2026 mega-guide.

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The bottom line

Two tracks, parallel, both starting day one.

Admin track, week one: register your address, open a bank account (Revolut or Wise), get a local SIM, find your faculty. Admin track, week two: student card, module registration, transit pass, healthcare basics. Social track, week one: ESN orientation, say yes to everything, attend your building's welcome events if you're in co-living. Social track, weeks two to four: find a weekly anchor, sign up for a buddy programme, start filtering invitations down to the people you actually click with.

By day 30 you'll have the basics handled. By day 60 the city will feel like yours.

Frequently asked questions

What should I do in my first week as an international student? Five things, in order: register your address with the local municipality (it unlocks everything else), open a local or Europe-wide bank account (Revolut or Wise work immediately), get a local SIM card if you're staying over 3 months, attend your ESN (Erasmus Student Network) orientation event, and walk to your faculty building once before your first class. Everything else can wait until week two.

Do I need to register my address when studying abroad? In most European countries, yes. Germany (Anmeldung), the Netherlands (BRP registration), Spain (Padrón), and Hungary (Lakcímkártya) all require address registration, with deadlines ranging from 5 days to 3 months. Without it, you usually can't open a bank account, get a student card, or access certain healthcare services. Co-living operators typically support residents through this process. Private landlords often don't.

How do I make friends as an international student? The single most reliable way is attending your ESN (Erasmus Student Network) orientation in week one, which is where most international students meet most of their semester's friends. Then say yes to invitations for the first two weeks, find one weekly activity (gym, society, language exchange) that gives you regular contact with the same people, and sign up for your university's buddy programme if it has one. Students in co-living environments meet people passively through shared spaces, which removes much of the effort of building a social circle from scratch.

What bank account should I open as an Erasmus student? Open Revolut or Wise before you fly. Both are free, app-based, take 5 minutes to set up, and give you a card you can use across Europe with low or no foreign transaction fees. Once you arrive, open N26 if you need a local German IBAN (some German and Dutch landlords require local IBANs for rent direct debits). Keep your home country bank account open for your Erasmus grant payments. Don't rely on your home country debit card abroad, you'll lose €100 to €300 a semester in foreign fees.

More guides to help you settle in

• Mega-Guide: Erasmus 2026: everything you need to know before you go
• Pillar Guide: Co-living for students: what it is, what it costs, and whether it's worth it (2026)
• City Guide: Top 5 student housing providers in Budapest for 2026
• City Guide: Top 5 student housing options in Riga for international students (2026)