Everything you always wanted to know about the Netherlands, but didn’t know whom to ask. A new handbook offers foreigners all the answers, and more.
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“When attempting to understand an other culture, there are many areas where we need to pause and consider how our culture and the host culture differ.” Thus begins ‘The Holland Handbook: Your Guide to Living in the Netherlands’ (%. 25), a helpful new book for the university’s foreign students and teachers.
Ostensibly, the handbook is for expatriates, offering detailed information about how to get married and divorced, enroll Junior in school, start a business, die% in Holland. But as a practical A-Z of Holland and tourist guide, short-term visitors will also find it extremely useful. Moreover, the handbook’s fine photographs alone are worth the cover price, providing a professional photo-album for future trips down Dutch memory lane.
Practically every aspect of daily life is covered, from “Getting Around” to “Getting an Education”; “The Expats’ Top Ten Tourist Attractions” to “The Top Ten Tourist Attractions Popular with the Dutch but Undiscovered by the Masses”. Plus interesting factoids the “Dutch consume 7.7kg of coffee per person per year,” fourth highest in the world. Amusing columns, written by experienced expats, dissect the minutiae of Dutch society.
Food: “Don’t expect Italian restaurants to serve food that tastes Italian. If you look into the kitchens of most of these places you’ll find a bunch of Turkish guys trying to make Italian food taste like Dutch food. A procedure that involves putting carrots in your marinara sauce.” Shopping: The Dutch don’t queue, so keep track of people waiting before you and speak up when it’s your turn. And walking: In an otherwise tidy country, watch out when walking about because the streets are a minefield of dog poep.
When sticking to the facts, the handbook excels, expertly explaining Dutch history, culture, economy and geography. Tedium arrives, however, when the authors use a string of cliches and sweeping generalizations to define what a Dutchman and Dutch society is. By offering a 1950’s vision of Holland, they’re able to ignore the developments of the past two decades.
So, we’re told that this is a society of “tolerant, frugal, hard-working, sober and single-minded people.” Ok. That proof of Dutch dislike for status symbols and “excessive opulence” is the fact that there aren’t many “Rolls Royces, Cadillacs, Daimlers and Jaguars” on the road. Nonsense. And that Dutch folk keep their curtains open at night because they’re “modest” and “normal”, inviting others to look in and see that they’re “living modestly” and do not have any airs. If you close your curtains, you have something to hide, which, if you were living modestly, you wouldn’t have.” Soft drugs are legal in Holland.
Sadly, there’s no mention of modern Dutch social phenomenon, like the rise of US-style capitalism and the political Right (VVD party); conspicuous, disposable consumption; societal tensions regarding Islam; or the triumph of car culture and TV (US cultural imperialism). Although the latter surfaces in a chapter that reads like one of Oprah’s pop-psychologists with a self-help book to sell, dispensing paternalistic psycho-babble until the Dutch cows (“Holsteins”) come home.
For example, the stages of transition that foreigners encounter are the Tourist Phase, when you’ll exclaim, “Oh, I love it here!”; the I-Hate-This-Country-Phase, when you’ll feel “incompetent… depressed, anxious and even hostile,” whining pathetically, “Life is confusing. How do I cope?”; and Culture Shock, when you’ll “be highly critical of the host culture and voice your negative feelings towards the local people” [try, ‘Hé klootviool, je moeder is een viswijf’ % editor].
Don’t despair, though, because there’s an Acceptance and Adjustment Phase, when you’ll “regain your sense of humor, make some Dutch friends,” and start taking showers again.
Although a shovel % for digging yourself out from under mounds of extraneous information % comes in handy when reading ‘The Holland Handbook’, it’s a bargain at %25 and will help make your stay here more enjoyable. Who knows, eventually you “…may even feel at home. Yes, even at home in Holland!”
The ‘Holland Handbook’ was published in close cooperation with Nuffic. Students searching for housing, social clubs, etc should visit these international student organisations: www.aiesec.nl & www.clublink.org
Everything you always wanted to know about the Netherlands, but didn’t know whom to ask. A new handbook offers foreigners all the answers, and more.
“When attempting to understand an other culture, there are many areas where we need to pause and consider how our culture and the host culture differ.” Thus begins ‘The Holland Handbook: Your Guide to Living in the Netherlands’ (%. 25), a helpful new book for the university’s foreign students and teachers.
Ostensibly, the handbook is for expatriates, offering detailed information about how to get married and divorced, enroll Junior in school, start a business, die% in Holland. But as a practical A-Z of Holland and tourist guide, short-term visitors will also find it extremely useful. Moreover, the handbook’s fine photographs alone are worth the cover price, providing a professional photo-album for future trips down Dutch memory lane.
Practically every aspect of daily life is covered, from “Getting Around” to “Getting an Education”; “The Expats’ Top Ten Tourist Attractions” to “The Top Ten Tourist Attractions Popular with the Dutch but Undiscovered by the Masses”. Plus interesting factoids the “Dutch consume 7.7kg of coffee per person per year,” fourth highest in the world. Amusing columns, written by experienced expats, dissect the minutiae of Dutch society.
Food: “Don’t expect Italian restaurants to serve food that tastes Italian. If you look into the kitchens of most of these places you’ll find a bunch of Turkish guys trying to make Italian food taste like Dutch food. A procedure that involves putting carrots in your marinara sauce.” Shopping: The Dutch don’t queue, so keep track of people waiting before you and speak up when it’s your turn. And walking: In an otherwise tidy country, watch out when walking about because the streets are a minefield of dog poep.
When sticking to the facts, the handbook excels, expertly explaining Dutch history, culture, economy and geography. Tedium arrives, however, when the authors use a string of cliches and sweeping generalizations to define what a Dutchman and Dutch society is. By offering a 1950’s vision of Holland, they’re able to ignore the developments of the past two decades.
So, we’re told that this is a society of “tolerant, frugal, hard-working, sober and single-minded people.” Ok. That proof of Dutch dislike for status symbols and “excessive opulence” is the fact that there aren’t many “Rolls Royces, Cadillacs, Daimlers and Jaguars” on the road. Nonsense. And that Dutch folk keep their curtains open at night because they’re “modest” and “normal”, inviting others to look in and see that they’re “living modestly” and do not have any airs. If you close your curtains, you have something to hide, which, if you were living modestly, you wouldn’t have.” Soft drugs are legal in Holland.
Sadly, there’s no mention of modern Dutch social phenomenon, like the rise of US-style capitalism and the political Right (VVD party); conspicuous, disposable consumption; societal tensions regarding Islam; or the triumph of car culture and TV (US cultural imperialism). Although the latter surfaces in a chapter that reads like one of Oprah’s pop-psychologists with a self-help book to sell, dispensing paternalistic psycho-babble until the Dutch cows (“Holsteins”) come home.
For example, the stages of transition that foreigners encounter are the Tourist Phase, when you’ll exclaim, “Oh, I love it here!”; the I-Hate-This-Country-Phase, when you’ll feel “incompetent… depressed, anxious and even hostile,” whining pathetically, “Life is confusing. How do I cope?”; and Culture Shock, when you’ll “be highly critical of the host culture and voice your negative feelings towards the local people” [try, ‘Hé klootviool, je moeder is een viswijf’ % editor].
Don’t despair, though, because there’s an Acceptance and Adjustment Phase, when you’ll “regain your sense of humor, make some Dutch friends,” and start taking showers again.
Although a shovel % for digging yourself out from under mounds of extraneous information % comes in handy when reading ‘The Holland Handbook’, it’s a bargain at %25 and will help make your stay here more enjoyable. Who knows, eventually you “…may even feel at home. Yes, even at home in Holland!”
The ‘Holland Handbook’ was published in close cooperation with Nuffic. Students searching for housing, social clubs, etc should visit these international student organisations: www.aiesec.nl & www.clublink.org
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