Students Living Abroad: the art of home sharing

Abstract

This paper focuses on the students’ experience of home sharing abroad, resulting from exchange programs, especially in what concerns new ways of living, from lifestyle to house rules. Young people used to share their family homes and lifestyles from the moment they were born until they got married, however, nowadays millions of youngsters share a house or an apartment in a foreign country for a limited period of time. Things have definitely changed, as have the cultural values regarding domestic roles, their virtues and vices, and we are now in presence of new mobility patterns but also of new lifestyles and house rules. The home sharing experience contains aspects such as the quest for a suitable place to rent, the establishment of house rules, encountering cultural differences, managing conflicts, and, of course, it implies a lot of fun, as partying plays an important role in studying abroad. Domesticity is under discussion and new territories of the public and private realms are explored.