Foreign Eye

The first fact is that the Netherlands, lying in the temperate or tepid latitudes of the globe, between the tropics and the polar circles, has generally mild shifts between summer and winter and a moderate maritime climate, rather than extreme hot or cold, according to my Lonely Planet travel guide. When preparing your trip to Delft from a distant warm country, you’re ready to face the weather; in your luggage a big jacket is packed, because winter winds can be cold and the official Dutch website for tourists www.holland.com says you ‘should certainly wrap up well in January and February’. And they add: One of the nice things about Holland is that ‘the Dutch are relaxed about clothes’. And I must admit that, yes!, all this about geographical, social and cultural conditions is really true, but nobody tells you about the impact the weather can have on your feelings and emotions. Yet international students report the significant influence that Dutch weather conditions have on their perceptual and emotional estimations of the university, the city and the country, all of which radically changes their lifestyles. So with winter coming, it’s better if you’re ready to face it.

“I discovered something unthinkable on the first day I started working full-time with seven Dutch students: one of the agenda points of our internal Oras meeting was ‘Point of Personal Attention’, when you talk about your feelings and other personal issues. Well, I’d never scheduled talking about my personal feelings before in my life. I thought: is this therapy or work? Must I prepare a document about my feelings or should it just come spontaneously? That’s when I realized: ‘O boy, there’s so much I’m going to learn about Dutch culture this year!’ I always knew the Dutch are very organized and schedule almost everything. They’re never late, and we all know they’re very direct about expressing their feelings. But I had no idea you could also apply rules and schedules to personal feelings.
With my own Middle-Eastern background, and after hanging out with Spanish, Greek and Italian friends through the years, feelings, to me, were things that came out after drinking a few glasses of wine, or arguing with someone you care about, or when having just fallen in love. In my mind, logic and feelings had always been two completely separate things. Feelings were completely disorganized, all over the place, or ‘chaotic’, as my Dutch colleagues called my version of dealing with feelings.
As the weeks passed and I worked through my confusion and talked about my personal feelings every Monday at 12:30, the  craziness of it started to diminish and I saw how relieving it was to talk about my feelings and how it gave me and my fellow colleagues perspective on how we were functioning through those very intensive weeks.
Some confusion remained though, and I kept trying to find the invisible line between Monday morning meetings and just talking about myself and my life during coffee breaks or when having drinks with a friend.
After a few months it was time for Oras’ mid-year evaluation weekend, which I’d dreaded from the beginning of the year, because evaluation weekend didn’t just mean evaluating our work but also evaluating each other and ourselves on a personal level. It meant playing a game where we would have to write on little pieces of paper everyone’s good and bad characteristics and then hand them to each other. As I collected the pieces of paper handed to me by my friends and colleagues, an image began forming in front of me, portraying what the other seven people I’d spent the last few months of my life with thought of me. Every piece of paper was like a piece to the puzzle and the anticipation of finding out what the final image looked like was killing me. These words on the pieces of paper turned out to be so powerful and eye-opening for each of us that several of us reached a breakthrough moment and shared with each other things we’d never shared with any one before.
So what did all this mean? Scheduling talking about feelings and evaluating each other with pieces of paper seems so impersonal to people from many other cultures. And yet we all connected on such a personal level that I would have probably never reached with my lifelong friends. Writing bad things about friends seems so harsh and disrespectful, yet finding out how we could improve about ourselves was eye-opening and life-changing.
This organized way of dealing with myself was just one of many things that surprised me about Dutch culture. We all hear how important it is these days to understand the different business cultures, in order to be successful in multi-national companies. Some people make it sound like there’s a handbook written on all the different cultures around the world, and once you’ve read it you know how it all works. In today’s world, cultures are being drawn to each other, and we live and work with different people and cultures everyday. How do we cross the culture barriers? How do we get the best elements out of each culture? Should we schedule talks about our feelings? Or do we want to remain ‘chaotic’? How does an organized Dutch student work with a chaotic international student? These are questions we all must answer.

Rose Manouchehri is a member of TU Delft’s University Student Council, responsible for issues relating to internationalization. If you have any questions or comments for Rose, e-mail her at R.Manouchehri@tudelft.nl