Review: Frankrigsgade Kollegiet (first review)

At Frankrigsgade 50 in Copenhagen you’ll find a 9 floor dormitory called ”The Frank”, with 14 people living on each floor. The address is on Amager, which you may have heard about, and what you may have heard might have been bad.

However, The Frank is on the good side: It is near Amagerbro metro station, just 6 minutes from Nørreport, convenient to the metro and several bus opportunities. Step on, for example 5A and 2A, and you have reached City Center before you’ve found a seat.

Shopping in the area is not scarce! – you find are all kinds of supermarkets in the area, and Amagercentret, a shopping center, is just a five minute walk away. On top of the closest supermarket – which is across the street – you find a Fitness World and the beach is 10 minutes away. So there is no excuse not for not staying fit in The Frank. And with Amagerbrogade and its’ wide selection of cafés, restaurants and pubs/bars no more than 10 minutes away, being close to the gym is a good thing. The area of The Frank is in general abundant with stuff to do and places to go. And more importantly, it is really easy and cheap to get home from a night out.

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The social facilities

Other than housing our 126 mailboxes, the ground floor is the place to go for a game of foosball or table tennis. There are two gardens, a small and a bigger garden. In these you can grill, have a beer etc. and as a new thing we started a Pool Party tradition last summer. Inside you’ll find our Party Room, for which the Party Comitee plans around five bashes each year. Two of them are yearly; Tour De Cuisine in January/February and the Drink-all-you-can in June/July. These are two parties you don’t wanna miss! The parties are for everyone who lives at the dormitory so this is a great opportunity to meet people from other floors. You can also rent the Party Room and throw a party of your own.

Another tradition we have is Tour de Amager, where we dress up like typical Amager people and go for a pub-crawl at the pubs and bars in the area. This is usually a lot of fun because the local people are either very fun to talk to or get really annoyed by us being there (most of them are there every night).

We also have a Facebook group, where we tell each other about stuff that’s going on at The Frank. This could be a movie on the big screen in the Party Room, an invite to tequila night on the 2nd floor or a love party on the 7th floor. Basically, it can be anything.

The facilities on each floor

You can get to floor 1-9 by using the elevator or the stairs. When you leave the elevator there is a long hallway with 14 rooms. At the end of the hallway when you walked past the washing and the drying machine, you’ll find the shared areas, such as the kitchen and the dining room.

You share the kitchen with 13 other students, which can be very frustrating. Since everyone has different cleaning habits, the kitchen can become quite a pigsty. When this happens, we set up a kitchen-meeting and remind each other to be more thorough next time. This usually helps. Other than this, it is in general very cosy to be in the kitchen, which is nice and big.

We also have a separate dining room, which has a wall of windows, that makes the room very light and the view is great from the higher floors. We use the dining room for a lot of occasions such as Christmas lunch (Julefrokost), floor parties, food-clubs and watching TV. We don’t have a lot of channels but you can watch the main Danish channels and a few foreign channels. We also use the dining room for studying, which usually works pretty good, at least on my floor, even though you cannot expect complete silence there.

In these areas it often feels like your floor-mates are your family – you may also discussed cleaning-stuff with your folks when you lived at home, so don’t worry: that earlier mentioned problem isn’t big and we really don’t argue a lot. We just solve the daily life problems by staying calm and polite. While you live on one of the floors at The Frank, you talk with many of your floor-mates daily, so you can become very close.

The rooms

When you step into a room there is a tiny hallway with build-in closets. If you continue forward you’ll step into a unfurnished room which is 14 m2. The room has a big window, that’s basically one of the walls of the room. This makes the room very light and it’s possible to open the window so you can step outside on a narrow, but long balcony. The view is either to the City Center or to Øresund and Malmø. Each room comes with a decent bathroom with a quite big shower area. In total the room is 20 m2.

All the things you need to use, such as water, electricity, TV, Internet and the washing machine, are included in the rent.

The Frank’s people

You will meet a lot of different people at The Frank and it is very different what people study. On one floor you can find students from CBS, from KUA, law students, medicine students and many others. People from any kind of higher education can apply.

Most of the people are very nice and open-minded, so you’ll always have someone to talk to – both while cooking and while partying. It can be difficult to meet people from other floors than your own if you don’t attend the social events that is for everyone on all floors. If you do, then it’s on and you will have so much fun!

That is what The Frank is like. A lot of fun and a great place to live.

[If you want to write an English-language review of your dorm write to uni-avis@adm.ku.dk and mark it ‘Dorms Disclosed’]

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