I prefer the abnormal one

With UK re-entry to Erasmus+ confirmed from January 2027, students’ unions are about to have incoming and outgoing exchange students again for the first time in six years.

Some SU staff will remember what that means. Many won’t – entire officer cohorts have come and gone since the UK last participated.

So when we found ourselves with a free afternoon in Reykjavík trying to find a TV covering the Hungarian election and a strong incentive to chase happy hour deals – beer is at least £10 a pint at full price – we thought we’d try to find some.

We found them everywhere. (Erasmus students. And also, happy hours.)

Eina með öllu

At the University of Iceland, over 2,000 of the 14,000 students are international, drawn from more than 100 countries. The university offers over 600 courses specifically for incoming exchange students. Reykjavík University takes significant numbers of Erasmus and bilateral exchange students each semester too.

And despite the eye-watering costs – the University of Iceland’s own figures cite a minimum monthly budget of ISK 247,572 (approximately £1,400) for a single person – the exchange students we met were overwhelmingly, almost aggressively, positive about the experience.

Mathilde, a French law student we ran into in a café, described the academic culture:

My first lecture, the professor arrived ten minutes late, apologised to nobody, and then asked us all to call her Sigríður. In Paris this would be a scandal. Here nobody even looked up.

Lukas, a German education student, said he’d been struck by how much the professors wanted exchange students to feel included:

They’d stop mid-lecture and ask what it was like in our countries. They genuinely wanted to know.

Classes are often small, and discussion is expected. The tone is informal in a way that clearly feels startling for those from a more hierarchical system. For UK students heading outward on Erasmus+ from 2027, this is the kind of thing nobody prepares them for – and the kind of thing SUs could.

The Erasmus village

Housing is the single biggest headache. The rental market is brutally tight – mass tourism and Airbnb have hoovered up available stock, and private rents run to ISK 200,000–300,000 a month (£1,100–£1,700) for even a modest place.

Everyone tells you to apply for student housing early. Nobody tells you that “early” means six months before you arrive, at 3am, refreshing a webpage.

For Mathilde, student housing with an ensuite and a shared kitchen – typically ten people – costs around ISK 85,000 a month (about £480). For Reykjavík, that’s a bargain. Lukas described his:

I had my own bathroom, which felt luxurious, and the kitchen had ten people sharing it, which sounds awful but was actually the best part. That’s where everything happened. Someone was always cooking, someone was always talking, someone was always having a crisis about their visa or their love life. I spent more time in that kitchen than in any lecture hall.

A separate housing complex – Gamli Garður – primarily hosts exchange students because residency is limited to one year. Several students described it as a kind of Erasmus village. Tereza, a Czech student, put it like this:

You walk out of your room and immediately you’re in a corridor with a French person, a Korean person, and someone from the Czech Republic arguing about whose turn it is to buy milk. It’s like a sitcom, but in the dark, in November, and the milk costs six euros.

The shared kitchen model comes up again and again in these conversations. When we talk about student accommodation in England, the trend has been toward en-suite studios with kitchenettes, designed for privacy and priced accordingly.

The Icelandic model is starting to be taken up by the big PBSA operators at home – huge shared kitchens on a single floor. Belonging, community, all of that. Food almost never fails.

Surviving the sticker shock

Every exchange student we spoke to had a relationship with Bónus, the discount supermarket with the cartoonish pink pig logo.

I had a relationship with that pig. I saw it more than I saw my professors.

Pablo, a Spanish student, described the cost of living as “physical – I felt it in my chest.” Sofia, from Portugal, said her Erasmus grant covered “roughly one week per month, if I didn’t eat.” Cooking at home is non-negotiable. And duty free at Keflavík airport on arrival is universally cited as essential. Pablo again:

The duty free is not a suggestion. It’s a survival strategy.

Happy hour is a blood sport. An Appy Hour app shows real-time deals across the city. Tereza had built her entire social architecture around it:

Kaldi at six, Húrra at seven, then hide in someone’s kitchen until midnight. It’s the only way to survive financially.

For UK SUs thinking about supporting outgoing Erasmus students, this is the reality. The Erasmus grant won’t cover Reykjavík – or Copenhagen, or Zurich, or anywhere else with a high cost of living.

Students will need realistic budgeting advice. They’ll need to know about Bónus and duty free and the Appy Hour app. The ones who thrive are the ones who figure this out in week one. The ones who don’t figure it out go home.

42 degrees in the snow

If there’s one thing that defines the exchange student experience in Reykjavík, it’s the swimming pool. Not swimming – soaking. The city has 18 geothermally heated public pools that function less as sports facilities than as open-air social institutions. Vesturbæjarlaug, nearest to the University of Iceland campus, is the default. It costs ISK 1,330 per visit – about £7.50. Lukas went three times a week:

It’s the thing I miss most. Sitting in 42-degree water in the snow, talking absolute rubbish with people from eight different countries. Nothing in my life in Graz comes close.

Mathilde saw her constitutional law professor in one of the hot tubs in his first week.

He nodded at me like it was completely normal. I suppose it was.

The etiquette matters – you must shower thoroughly, without a swimsuit, before entering. Sofia:

There’s a woman in the changing room who watches you. She’s not aggressive about it. She doesn’t say anything. She just watches. And you know. You know that you have to shower properly. By the third visit it’s completely normal.

The hot tub is where friendships happen – where group projects get discussed, where international and domestic students mix in a way that structured buddy programmes try and fail to replicate.

If a UK SU wanted to think seriously about what makes integration work, the answer might be less “welcome week icebreaker” and more “42-degree water and a relative absence of clothing.”

The darkness and the family

Oh yeah, the darkness. In December, Reykjavík gets about four to five hours of daylight – and it’s not proper daylight, more a prolonged greyish dusk. Lukas:

December nearly finished me. You wake up in the dark, you go to class in the dark, you come home in the dark. I bought a SAD lamp and a lot of vitamin D and I went to the pool every day. That’s how you survive.

Then summer inverts everything. In June there’s pretty much no night at all – bars black out their windows. Sofia took a photo of the Sun Voyager sculpture at 11pm and it looked like the middle of the afternoon.

It messes with your head. You forget to sleep. Everyone becomes slightly manic. It’s fantastic.

The bonding, though, is what everyone keeps coming back to. The welcome week at the University of Iceland is intensive – by day three you’ve done icebreakers, a campus tour, a pub quiz, and been to a hot tub with strangers. By day five those strangers are your best friends. By the end of the semester they’re family. Sofia:

The Erasmus group becomes your family. You cook together, you travel together, you sit in hot tubs together, you complain about the prices together. By the end you’ve spent more time with these people than with anyone you’ve ever known. And then you all go home to different countries and it breaks your heart.

Mathilde, stirring what might have been her fourth coffee at Stofan:

The thing about Iceland is that it’s too expensive, too dark, too cold, too remote, and too small. And it’s perfect. I can’t explain it. Nobody can. You just have to go.

What this means for SUs

The UK rejoins Erasmus+ from January 2027. Over 100,000 UK participants could benefit in the first year. UK students will be able to study across Europe under Erasmus+ terms, and EU students will arrive at UK universities again – paying domestic rather than international fees – for the first time since Brexit.

But the infrastructure that makes Erasmus+ work isn’t just funding and bilateral agreements. It’s welcome weeks that actually integrate people – peer support networks, ESN sections, buddy programmes, the person who tells you about the Appy Hour app.

As we found in the Netherlands earlier this year, ESN currently has just 14–15 sections in the UK, down from 21 before Brexit. The network atrophied when Erasmus went away. Rebuilding it before January 2027 is not a trivial task.

Students’ unions have a role here – both in supporting incoming exchange students and in making sure UK students actually get to go. That means lobbying institutions to sign bilateral agreements, pushing for realistic cost-of-living support, making sure exchange opportunities reach students from disadvantaged backgrounds (who are least likely to take them up), and – yes – rebuilding the social infrastructure that helps a French law student in a strange city find a café with refill coffee and a hot tub that stays open in the snow.

We have an SU explainer on what Erasmus re-entry means and what SUs should be doing about it. If you haven’t read it, now would be a good time.

Tereza had the last word: