Need Some Advice On Getting A Place To Live Overseas

[Wolfeye]

Hello, everyone. I am thinking I'll be leaving for Europe this November & was wondering on specifics on getting a place to live. Apartments, hostels, hotels, Airbnb, couch-surfing, whatever you guys can tell me about it. I need specific how-to stuff with how to find it, how to pay, how to know if it's overpriced or a bad idea, all of that.

If if matters, I'm thinking I'll be either in the Mediterranean (Portugal, Spain, and Italy) or Eastern Europe (Czechia, Slovakia, and probably Romania or Bulgaria for when my Schengen expires). I get that this is pretty broad geographically, but I figure things would work more or less the same way & if there are a couple of area-specific differences they could be filled in.

To give some info for this to factor into: I definitely want to get to a language school (so I can function better & so it lengthens my time limit), I definitely want to spend some degree of time over there & possibly turn this into a permanent living situation. I don't really know how things work, so I'm having a hard time factoring into my plan. I think I'll at the very least wind up living in Eastern Europe (probably Czechia or Slovakia- actually leaning somewhat more toward Slovakia now), and possibly having a place in the Mediterranean (even if it's just land that I might put a shack on). There's a language school in Portugal that looks good & the town it's in is cheap (but I'm have A LOT of trouble finding out information on everything there).

The thing is, I just found out about getting Italian citizenship from getting an apartment in Italy & staying there for a while. I don't remember the whole thing, but it seems you fill out some forms with the cops to establish residence & rack-up some time spent in Italy (at least holding on to the apartment for that long), then you've got it in a year. So I'm wondering if I should do that first, then maybe I can do similar things in other countries & live there if I want.