Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)

if you want this experience to be the best time of your life - just let everything happen, don't expect or plan too much right from the beginning and - most important - spend time with local students as much as possible!!! you should be especially open to cultural differences in order to be able to really dive into madrid's life (some things work a lot more slowly in spain as you might be used to for example). i only travelled around madrid (to toledo for example) and to barcelona - travelling through spain is amazing, but i preferred staying in madrid with my friends there because 5 months isn't such a long time.

I did at frist have an University appartment for Erasmus students, but I chose not to take it when I saw that: the rooms were extrmely small and in bad conditions;no natural light in the appartment;old furniture and its loctaion, quite far from the campus.

Take a lonley planet with you...there are so many highly recommended places in spain which you shouldn´t miss. The most important for me was Granada...but that´s a personal story:-) Try to travel arround as much as you can...it´s worth it:-)

Spain is a cheap country.Do not go to supermarkets to buy food, just go to the "mercados" of each neighbourhood!