Essential Dutch phrases

Your citizen service number, issued when the gemeente registers you. Salary, banking, insurance and tax all hang off it — nothing works before it exists.

Registering your address with the city, legally within five days of arrival. In Nijmegen this is an ordinary gemeente appointment — there is no expat centre to shortcut it.

The national digital login. Tax, allowances, health insurers, pension and the municipality all sit behind it. The activation code arrives by post, so your name has to be on the letterbox.

The permit a Nijmegen landlord needs to let rooms separately in a house below a certain value. A lot of advertised rooms do not have one, and an unpermitted let is a tenancy that ends when enforcement arrives.

A live-in landlady or landlord letting a room in their own home. Nijmegen actively recruits them because of the room shortage, and it is a genuinely good first landing — cheaper, legal, and with someone who can explain the bin schedule.

Auditioning for a room in front of the people who already live there. It is a house dinner disguised as a viewing, and they are choosing a housemate, not a tenant.

The Rhine's main Dutch branch and the busiest river in the country. It defines the city's north edge, its flood politics and its best walk — the Spiegelwaal side channel dug in the 2010s to give the river more room.

Hill. Nijmegen has actual ones, on a glacial moraine ridge, which is why the Seven Hills Run happens here and why an e-bike is a more reasonable purchase than anywhere else in the Netherlands.

The compulsory own-risk excess on your health insurance, which you pay out of pocket before the insurer pays for anything other than GP visits.

The International Four Days Marches, based here since 1925 and the largest multi-day walking event in the world. Tens of thousands walk 30, 40 or 50 km a day in the third week of July while the entire city throws a week-long party around them.

What the city calls itself in local dialect. Nijmegen sits in Gelderland, not Brabant, so people here say 'doei' rather than 'houdoe' — getting that wrong is a mild but noticeable tell.

One number for police, fire and ambulance, free from any phone. Operators speak English. 0900-8844 is the non-urgent police line.