20150505 - dutch culture

Dutch Culture From Foreign Perspectives

February 24, 2008

A group of international students were asked a few years ago to write something about their interpretation of Dutch Culture. I managed to get a hold of these. Below you can find small excepts of what they wrote:
 
Excerpt 1
Maybe the biggest difference in cultures is the fact that the Dutch don’t appreciate it if people visit them unexpectedly. As it says in the Holland Handbook: ‘The Dutch do not like company to stop by informally, if they just happen to be “in the neighbourhood”. If you know someone very well, you can call in the morning to ask if you can come by that evening, but normally you should call further ‘in advance’.
The worst thing you can do is stop by, uninvited, at dinnertime. If you get invited to enter the house while the family is eating, most likely they offer you a chair to sit with them at the table but they won’t offer you anything to eat. If you get lucky you may be offered some dessert, because there is always enough yoghurt, thanks to a special kind of scratch instrument that the Dutch invented to get all the yoghurt out of the carton’.
In Spain everybody loves company.The Spanish like to go and visit friends and relatives at every time of the day. And when dinner is served, it is considered a bad manner if you leave, you would insult the hostess.

Excerpt 2
What I think is really typically Dutch is the tolerance towards one another. In one of the books I read: ‘Tolerance is not only a virtue, it is a civic duty.’ With 370 inhabitants at every square kilometer, Holland has got the highest population density of Europe. If the Dutch didn’t forgive each others shortcomings and peculiarities, or at least ignore, life would be unbearable. Tolerance is really veiled pragmatism. The Dutch think that everyone should do the things he wants to do within the limits of decency. I think that is a very good quality. The Dutch tolerance is famous all over the world and we have showed the world that in most of these cases our approach proved to be a good one.

Excerpt 3
I found one thing that the Dutch and Spanish have in common....................................



 http://www.internationalstudents.nl/dutch-culture-from-foreign-perspectives/