Travel Preparation
From the view of Félix
This preparation for Erasmus can be summarized in three parts:
one that concerns the management of housing during the semester, another that includes the application for a scholarship and finally the preparation of the journey to the technical university of Ostrava VSB.
The VSB technical university
Housing management:
My classmates (also going to the University of Ostrava) and I chose to live in the student dormitory of the university for practical reasons such as the cost of the accommodation (cheaper than other apartments in town), its convenient proximity to the university and to avoid having to look for an apartment (a very tedious task for a result that we know is more expensive and less interesting than student apartments). Fortunately, my friend Richard, warned us and helped us when new steps were available. We also felt that this dormitory would allow us to better integrate into the student life of Ostrava, to practice English more and to have more fun.
This process I can only describe as annoying: for example, any information about housing or the steps needed for this application being available only on one of their sites (when they could send us emails, if only to warn us). The process was quite fast and once the deposit (about 200euros) was paid I was able to choose my housing and more importantly the roommate I would have (because the university forces us to have roommates of different nationalities than ours). So, I'm in dorm A, 11th floor with a Russian roommate. During this process I receive the help of my comrade Dorian Gillot.
The application for a scholarship:
After a comparison of scholarships and because the Envoléo scholarship was offered to me, I decided to apply for an Envoléo scholarship. The application was tedious like any administrative formality involving the government and required certain documents (I think in particular of the certificate of schooling of the last year). Currently there is only an authenticated certificate of arrival due before March 15 which we do not have access to yet.
Envoleo's logo
Preparing for the trip:
I have chosen to leave by train from Metz (having already left from Angers) with fellow GRE student Tom Lebeau to Prague where we intend to stay for a day or two with the intention of discovering the city before then leaving for Ostrava. To book the train we first went on sncf.connect which was not working well, so we had to fall back on another website Trainline which fortunately had more routes available and at lower prices. It still cost us a little less than 200 euros for a 19h journey (at night) and 3 connections.