I started English lessons in fifth grade. Nevertheless, I have an accent (even though American politeness sometimes seems to oblige native speakers to pretend they never noticed). As I’ve noted before, the more tired I am, the more Dutch seeps through. This results mostly in severe difficulties in the ‘th’ sound. When I focus, I can pronounce ‘brother’ right, but whenever I say ‘first things first’, I mix up the sounds, creating the even harder to pronounce ‘thirst fings thirst’. Also, don’t give me a Bible with the word ‘brethren’ in it.
Like this one.
What’s worse than my accent, however, is that sometimes it’s not really English any more. It’s replacing normal Dutch with Dutch with English words. This means a shift from ‘we’ll all pretend he doesn’t have an accent, just smile and nod’ to ‘what did you just say?’ (I found a wikipedia page on Dunglish; I found myself guilty on all of listed symptoms, although not as bad as the most colorful examples). Below is a great video, because of three things: a Dutch man faking a Scottish accent, an American speaking Dutch (two sentences) and then bursting out in a flawless Dutch accent.
Sometimes, it’s a little subtler than downright wrong. When miss Missouri is trying to learn Dutch and getting ‘nice to meet you’ right (‘Aangenaam kennis te maken’), I tell her to ignore the whole sentence. People don’t say that, especially not in the robotic way the cd will teach you. There is a downside to this, though. I must have met quite a few people who now think I did not take any pleasure in meeting them. Also, I must seem rude every now and then, because the Dutch use of the word ‘please’ is for toddlers that wanted to be lifted only. Americans use it for passing salt, ordering coffee and asking for amnesty alike. Maybe this is the reason I get a dirty look along with my salt all the time…
Let’s face it: America is basically an independent woman having divorced Europe. One day, America couldn’t take it anymore – all the feudalism, monarchies and free spirits – and moved away. Now, she keeps telling herself she’s better off. At least she’s independent and doing things on her own terms. In this light, it’s a little weird how European traditions seem to be a big marketing asset. Walking through the aisles of any grocery store will have you pondering on how things would be in the old continent. For instance, a can of hot cocoa promised to give you that feeling from a ‘European tradition of drinking hot cocoa on the promenades of Rome and Barcelona’.
All the while being topless, another great European tradition.
There’s a lot wrong with that. As I am an expert on American-European cross culture, I can explain why. There is no such thing as a European culture. Europe is actually a continent, containing many different countries and just as much cultures. There is a Dutch culture, a German culture and, please pay attention all of you in marketing, an Italian and Spanish culture (Rome and Barcelona). It could very well be an Italian tradition to drink hot cocoa on the promenade, but the chance of that also being a tradition in Spain is about as high as the chance of a Mexican family baking an all-American apple pie for their church pot luck next Sunday. Overmore, as far as I know, drinking hot cocoa is not really a tradition on any promenade.
‘And after our pot luck, we’ll watch some football and hunt some deer.’
It’s not all bad news though. We actually do have a few traditions in Europe. Through the ages, a bond has been formed and an identity can be seen. As any culture, Europeans see how certain events bind them together. It is in those events that we remember what Europe stands for, how we set ourselves apart from the rest of the world and how to take pride in that. Still, the number of traditions is very limited and it has occured to us how other continents want to take part in this as well. To conclude, I give you the European traditions:
Having wars between the French, Germans and British (nowadays revolving around a monetary currency, but war it is).
Feeling superior over any other country for being French/German/British.
Mocking the French/German/British for their arrogance.
Mocking the United States for their lack of social security, while also envying their lack of high taxes.
Bonus: This is a somewhat less traditional way of drinking cocoa in the Netherlands.
Watching a lot of television makes you less capable in a lot of things among a wide spectrum of intelligence. Even worse, I can’t talk to people when there’s a television in the background. Combine that with the intake of alcohol and you may have found out why going to an American bar is mentally challenging for me. It’s pretty easy to measure, too. My mental capacities are strongly related with my accent. By the time I start talking Dutch, it’s time to go home.
Sometimes, television fills the gap between two activities. There’s nothing worse than waiting for a doctor’s appointment or running on a treadmill without a television. Before you know it, your mind wonders off and you’re thinking for no reason. We wouldn’t want that. That’s why it’s a good thing we now have television even in the smallest gaps of life.
The Dutch have two things to gasp about: low gas prices and the mini tv.
That’s right. If you were ever afraid how to bridge the time gap that you use to fill up your tank, don’t despair. NFL highlights, a short weather overview and news flashes are at your service. Now you’ll never have to be bored the whole forty to sixty seconds you stand outside your car. And even better yet, if you never watch a game outside a bar or airport (like yours truly), you can still participate in coffee conversations about the three most spectacular catches, runs and touchdowns that were evidently made last weekend.
What’s your favorite magazine/tv channel/phone app for the doctor’s waiting room?
As I am preparing for a wedding, I’m calling a lot of people. In the Netherlands, phone calls follow a script that would make telemarketers feel controlled. Because the Dutch are apparently afraid of the novelty that is communication on a distance, they pick up shouting their own name, just to establish who is being called before the conversation has properly started. Then, in an immediate response, the caller will pronounce his name and purpose for calling. The first part may seem a little odd, since the caller dialed a number and knows who is calling, but before you giggle too loud, remember the last time you dialed the wrong number and took about a minute to find out. In case you’re ashamed, let me sympathize. When I started calling miss Missouri (which I do at 5am central time), I mixed up the last four digits of her number and got a Spanish talking lady four mornings in a row. Imagine being waked up by a Dutchman at 5am who takes a solid minute to figure out you are not his girlfriend. Four days in a row.
For some reason, searching for ‘angry Spanish woman’ got me a few angry naked latino men, so I went for J-LO with a shotgun.
For some reason, calling English-speaking people at more decent times does not go over much better. I am still used to the idea that a conversation starts with a proper name, so that I can go from there. Let me picture you the first twenty seconds of my phone call yesterday:
Callee: ‘Hello?’
Me: ‘…’
Crickets: ‘Chirp chirp chirp’
Okay, maybe the crickets weren’t there, but it sure felt that awkward. Don’t worry, after I said my name and had him try to pronounce it (he failed, it’s okay), our conversation was perfectly okay. I’ll be better prepared for any calls from now on and make sure our wedding has the appropriate people.
Ever talked to someone who you didn’t know was the wrong person?
Walmart is fascinating. Shopping after ten is an experience that you both can’t miss and never want to happen again. The opposite can also be interesting. Mom and pop stores do exist in the Netherlands, but in a different form. My favorite encounter with an American mom and pop store was last summer. During our car rides I had seen a small book store a few blocks from miss Missouri’s apartment. I had determined it was at most a fifteen-minute walk, so I decided to check it out. After a solid forty minutes of walking in the intense Missouri heat, I arrived at the book store. It was at a small store strip, one of those places where several smaller stores and a ridiculous amount of parking spots are placed alongside the road. The book store is cramped in between a Subway sandwich shop and a shady nail salon. Note that book stores for me are like malls to a stereotypical teenage girl. Sometimes, my neck hurts on Sunday just because I’ve been reading book titles in a 90 degree angle all Saturday.
The best thing about American book stores might just be the chairs. They also prevent a pain in the neck afterwards.
The store was small, to any standard. It didn’t help that too many book cases were actively occupying too many square inches. While I spent hours browsing the books, I started wondering how the guy that owned the store could ever pay his rent. I walked around for a long time and nothing else happened in the store. Nobody walked in, nobody called on the phone and the owner was not actively selling books on the internet, but rather getting high on his own supply. I decided on three books and wanted to pay. The well-read man got up from his chair, strolled to the register and added up the prices for the books. In the middle of this process, the phone rang. He looked at me as if he wanted me to tell him what to do. He answered the phone, looked up a book in his system and then told the tele-client that he did not have the book he was looking for. When he had hung up, he looked at me again and shook his head in disbelief. ‘What do you know’, he said, ‘it always gets busy when I’m just having a customer.’
Whenever you dive into a new culture, you start noticing differences. Visiting Missouri might thus be described as the attempt to be a cannonball in American culture. To understand a country and its culture, history is all important. Whereas American culture so often seems rooted in a struggle for freedom and the idea to start from scratch; Dutch history, too, could bring forth a view on the culture of The Netherlands. Describing important historical events from my home country can perhaps clarify the culture differences this blog revolves around. Of course, I’m no historian, so this short history is not pretending to be complete, even though the entertaining goal is attained through facts, rather than my own opinion. Where further information could be interesting, I have provided links to wikipedia pages. The one on the bottom is not to be skipped, though. This is the story about a people that are known for their tolerance, their cooperative and exploring nature and the fact that they liked their country so much, they made more of it. As the saying goes: God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.
Even though archeological findings indicate human activities emerged around 2,500 B.C., the interesting part of history starts with the Roman Empire – as always. Even though The Netherlands were seen as a useless swamp, some cities still show remains from Caesar’s friends (my university uses ‘Lugduno Batava’ in its seal; the Latin description of the city of Leiden). After the Romans left, small communities start to develop and stay quiet for over a thousand years. Around the 12th century, these communities start coordinating the maintenance of the dams and dikes they had built to keep their feet dry. Some scholars still believe this necessity-based regulation still shapes today’s cooperating-government model (I just forgot which ones, so there’s no reference here). What is sure, however, is how this local coordinating can be seen as typically Dutch. As a Belgian girl once told me, the Dutch ‘have quite a fetish to regulate everything and then talk about it for hours, until everyone will agree’.
Say all you want, Belgians, but it keeps our feet dry.
Things get really interesting around the 1550’s. Protestantism catches on in Europe and the local communities have developed into several provinces (Holland being the most important one), who work together as a republic. When the Spanish king wants to raise taxes and force Catholicism through the rebellious Dutch throats, they pull off a classic puberty move: they shut the door, mock in their room and do exactly the opposite of what they were told. In practice, they rise up against the Spanish, even when their cities are besieged for months, and announce Protestantism to be the official religion, while allowing other religions to quietly exist. This draws the attention of the Pilgrim Fathers and other groups in search of freedom.
They called it freedom, but this is clearly a picture of the siege of Leiden.
While William of Orange (and his offspring, after he’s murdered) fights off the Spanish, the rest of the country starts developing rapidly. As they are acquainted with water, the Dutch have a superior fleet that swiftly discovers the whole world. The Dutch East India Company and the Dutch East India Company introduce new trading mechanisms throughout the world, including globalization and stock exchange. Their trade and colonial business expand the economical range of the republic to the east coast of North and South America, Australia, India, Japan, Indonesia and South Africa, some of which are official colonies, up until WWII. At the homeland, cultural live really flourishes, resulting in memorable names such as painters Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and early scientists Huygens and Leeuwenhoek.
An overview of the Dutch Empire, as provided by wikipedia
By the time the United States had announced its independence, difficulties arose among the Dutch. Internal quarrels combined with the imperial forces of Napoleon lead to both occupation by the French and later the start of Dutch monarchy when sovereignty is gained back. Being occupied is never fun, but at least the French gave us the metrical system; a blessing that’s hard to measure, even with those wonderful standardized indicators. After 15 years of renewed independence, the Belgians decided to go their own way and should still regret that decision. The last constitutional change occurs in 1848, when the current Dutch constitution is written. Even with all its colonies, the superiority that was evident in earlier ages never comes back.
While WWI skips The Netherlands, Germany doesn’t care much for its neutrality when May 1940 comes around. The barely equipped Dutch soldiers fight for all their worth, but nostalgic defense tactics like flooding the battlefield prove useless against paratroopers and the rigorous bombing of Rotterdam. German occupation lasts from 1940 to 1945. After WWII, the world as we know it takes shape. In the Dutch case, you can take this quite literally, as a new province is added after drying the land in the middle. Alongside with increasingly rapid economical growth, the sexual and social revolutions take place. This, again, is where Dutch tolerance regains its name and its current reputation. In hindsight, the years 1970-2000 are years without major problems and of flourishing. The murder of an upcoming populist politician in May 2002, even when just an incident in the bigger picture, is generally marked as the moment where the country lost its innocence and joins the Western world in all its problems and new millennium struggles.
This is nowaday’s shape of The Netherlands. The highlighted area is our newest province.
As I said, Dutch history could perhaps provide a deeper view on culture. I think this is still the case. Some of the characteristics I have highlighted above match cultural expressions. There is a pride amongst Dutch, comparing the relative small size of the country with the big role it has played in the Western world. Between people, businesses and all sorts of stakeholders, there is a constant need to cooperate, compromise and talk things out. Labor strikes are very rare, as are huge demonstrations. Trade and globalization are still ever present in Dutch thinking and economy, as is their stubbornness demonstrated in the straight-forward way they communicate. More on Dutch culture can be found here in bullet points on wikipedia (while reading it, I agreed with all points, all the while finding it hard to believe these points are that noteworthy).
Drawing from personal experience or the bullet point list, what strikes you most about Dutch culture?
Extra:
A video clip that recently became popular and explains both the difference between Holland and The Netherlands and today’s constitutional organization:
When travelling the ‘Show Me State’ (which in my head always sounds as if the National Association for Flashers resides in Missouri), I can’t help but notice some things are not done when walking around in public places. First of all, there’s the infamous ‘no shoes, no shirt no service’ slogan, which evidently does not apply for those walking around at Walmart dressed in wife-beaters and flipflops. Second, there’s this sign:
A few things come to my Dutch, weapon-free mind when I see this. Does this mean I can come in with a bazooka on my shoulder for everyone to see? How do they check for concealed firearms if they’re concealed? I may have the most innocent face in all the Midwest, but I’m pretty sure whoever is laying down this law wants to check people now and then. I’ll pass for that job, because if there’s anyone I don’t want to pet down it’s the guy who chose to ignore said sign. If you come from a country where guns are limited to governmental forces, licensed hunters and very few shady people (I see only the first category), having a gun in your direct proximity is more than a little weird. This sign didn’t help the weirdness.
One of the places that pleasantly surprised me last August was a jazzy bar next to a comedy club. That describtion makes much more sense than you’d think, don’t worry. Miss Missouri and I went to a comedy club twice and the second time we decided to have a warming up in the bar next door. Most of the crowd was like us, waiting for the show to start, but what a shame that was. Five hipsters were playing very fine music, so soothing that the guitar player seemed hardly awake. One man was entertaining three girls by dancing their socks off, and boy did he dance.
It was nothing spectacular, but this guy made the place what it was supposed to be. A grey old couple had the front row seats just for themselves and nodded their heads with the rocking back and forth of the dancing couple. He lead the three girls one by one, but sometimes it was as if he lead the bass line and everybody’s bopping heads. The music couldn’t have been perfect, he might not be the best dancer alive and I might have been more than just a little bit jealous, but that man made my night. I’ve got a wedding coming up; I should really learn how to dance like that. Boogie down.
One of the things you notice when shopping in an American supermarket, is the tendency to promote domestically made products. A very normal tendency. Home-made products would do good anywhere in the world and I believe that it’s important to support small, individual businesses. So any product that is made within American borders will make sure that you won’t miss out on a great characteristic like that. Sometimes, I feel like they’ve been taking it too far.
That’s a box of peanuts I ate on my way home last month. For those of you who are blind (and reading this blog nevertheless): it says that the product was ‘made with pride in the USA’. I always thought a box of peanuts was one of those products that are made by people lucky to have a job in the first place who might not even speak English. I was wrong. Apparently, those peanuts were packed by real patriots who take pride in serving their country by stuffing small boxes with little nuts. Good thing they told me, of I wouldn’t have tasted the American spirit in them. They were delicious. Another good example was miss Missouri’s shampoo bottle. Every time I was in the shower, I went reading the back of the shampoo bottle. A little disclaimer always caught my eye: ‘made with ingredients from USA and/or other countries’. That is the emptiest message of all time. You can in fact put in on literally everything. In fact, after doing a little research, I found out that 100% of all the products in Dutch supermarkets are made out of ingredients from the USA or other countries. How patriotic is that?
In a discussion on Twitter I recently had, this stadium came up. That’s a high school football stadium worth an astonishing $60 million. It surprised me. Of course, I wasn’t alone in being surprised, because $60,000,000 is a lot of money. It may have surprised me even more, however, because I am not used to the combination of high schools and sport. In fact, I always thought that high school stadiums were build by volunteers who just happened to have a few bored Saturdays and devoted the attention they normally spent on fixing their truck to build a few stands and have a beer afterwards. Apparently, I need to alter my image.
Also, nobody ever came to watch any of my games. Well done, high schools. Thanks to Burril Strong for using the picture (click it!)
As I said, I am unfamiliar with the idea of high school sports. I played team handball throughout the time I was in high school , but that had nothing to do with the school I was on. There was no curriculum concerning sports outside school hours or any organized team sport connected to school. How different is this situation from American schools. It seems as if everyone I meet has played at least one sport during their school times and people take it quite seriously. It’s one of the things that seem to shape one’s future, up to the point where they pay for college having played a sport. That’s serious sports. Some people even take it $60 million seriously. It seems like a lot of money, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned ever since I have been visiting Missouri, it’s how Americans get absolutely crazy when it comes to sports.
