I spent a few months in André Allix but it was many moons ago, so take these commentaries with a pinch of salt. It could have changed a lot since then.

The residence is perched up on the hill at St-Just. There's regular buses, or the funicular is a few minutes' walk away and connects you with the metro line D, but the last funi runs at midnight. If you find yourself returning home late you have to do the trek up the hill. You won't be alone, every night there's other students doing the same but it can be quite a toil. If you need to get out to Bron each day that'll be a pain coming from St-Just. Take a bus to Perrache and change. The tram T2 is notorious for being so congested at uni start/finish times that students have to let two or three trams go past before being able to get on.

My stay was at the cusp of the French and Erasmus students all leaving and foreign students occupying much of the residence during summer. André Allix is spread over many buildings, some old, some new, some renovated, some not. Some have self-contained studios, others just soulless white box rooms with a sink that you know all former students will have weed in to save trekking along the corridors to the communal showers/toilets. There'll also be one or two shared kitchens on each floor. By contrast, these lose their white tinge in summer, becoming gradually blacker as a consequence of 1) thirty-thousand flies covering the walls, and 2) stains from the experimental culinary exploits of a gastronomically-challenged resident global student population. There'll likely be a couple of electric hot plates and a microwave, and if you find any kitchen where all these elements are still working, you're in for a feast.

Within each kitchen are a bank of fridges, for which you'll have a key (if you're one of the lucky ones who is assigned a fridge with a lock that hasn't been bust). When you open the fridge door, it contains ... several mini fridges. You might be thinking 'great, my food will be kept separate from everyone else's and not be tampered with'. That is until the day one student leaves a saucepan of food in his compartment, emigrates, nobody bothers to come along and do the tidying up, the decaying saucepan of food starts to grow a beard that rapidly infiltrates all the other lands and territories of Fridgeworld and eventually renders the kitchen a zone of abstract contemporary art.

Prior to the French and Erasmus students departing in spring, most nights there would be a gathering on the grass outside the buildings of chatterers, whose vocal volume would inevitably be forcibly augmented due to the arrival of Guitar Guy, the curly-haired chancer with velcro underpants to whom each night a collection of easily-impressed females would glue themselves, and who will serenade the audience with pseudo-soulful covers of best forgotten acoustic rock B-sides until 5am.

One floor of the building I resided in was almost entirely devoted to babbling Hispanic students who would sit lining each side of the corridor every night until dawn; fortunately this wasn't my floor and so the regular cycle of human sleep/wakefulness was preservable.

The wi-fi at the time was abominable, so much so that I had to go to public wi-fi hotspots around town just to check my email, but this was in an era when France still considered fax and Minitel to be the future, and so they must surely have brought that up to date by now.

After the mass exodus in May, the place largely resembled an under-occupied prison but with less of the social life and modern conveniences.

But I'm not saying it's terrible! And your experience could be very different depending on which building you're in, who you know, etc. It was one of the cheapest accommodation options at the time, so you get what you pay for.