SECOND TESTIMONY
"When I first moved to Maastricht in August 2020 everything seemed fine. I found a pretty apartment, and I was so happy about that since I’ve heard that it would be troublesome finding an apartment. However, the first weeks passed by without any problems. Then, I saw them. Mousedroppings all over my apartment. And they became more and more. Soon the mice started to mess up our food resources. There were hundreds of them. You could hear them patter during the night; it was awful.
However, I think that it is a problem a lot of students here in Maastricht encounter. At least, that it was I have heard. That was when we first consulted our agency, Tecta Housing. They told us we should organize an exterminator ourselves. He made clear after a visit that he will never be able to fully extinguish them and that we should move out. After a lot of long negotiations with Tecta Housing, they allowed me to move out under the condition that I’ll find another tenant to take over the rest of my contract. When approaching this, I could obviously not tell the new tenant that they’d move into an apartment with a massive mice problem and an uncooperative agency, but I had no choice since I really did not want to live there anymore, as it affected all my life very badly to this point in time. Then the real stress began.
I looked for a new apartment but couldn’t find anything. Which in the end led to me moving to Cologne after having only spent four months in Maastricht, due to the shortage of available good housing options. Online Classes were my program for the rest of the first academic year. I only moved back to Maastricht for the beginning of the second academic year. Fortunately, I have not discovered any mice yet.”
– Anonymous, female, second year law student
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