Yeah, not trying to get anyone down about moving to NL but i lived there for like 2 years and this was more or less my experience. Maybe it was my own fault for having a bad time though..Genevieve wrote:Amsterdam isn't the Netherlands, though! It's not 'respect and tolerance' but pretend-respect and pretend-tolerance. The actual Dutch philosophy is 'talk to people different from you with a smile, but try to avoid them at all cost'. You should stick around the big cities like Amsterdam/Rotterdam/Utrecht/The Hague and mostly the centers. Those are the really international, multicultural and kinda bohemian and TOLERANT bits of NL. But most of the country is pretty backwards and really narrowminded and cultrually like behind 10 years compared to the rest of western Europe. I moved from the East to Utrecht some time ago and it's like I'm not even in the same country.
Flanders is a lot more chill and tolerant, culturally, than NL is. But if I had it my way, I'd live in Amsterdam and just visit Flanders a lot.
Not tryna shit in anybody's cereal though :p Amsterdam IS awesome. But other than the Randstad (all those big cities I mentioned) it's reaaally unrepresentative of NL as a whole.
I found many Dutch people i interacted with during this time to be quite cold and hostile towards me, at least they seemed that way, but maybe i am just taking it the wrong way. I got the impression that many of the people i interacted with saw my kindness and politeness as a weakness, or something to be mistrusted.
As in the UK, i think there is an increasing feeling of resentment towards immigrants(especially Arabic people) amongst the general population.
I guess in the end though you could probably say similar things of any country from the point of view of an immigrant, and i'm not trying to pass judgement on the Dutch people in any way. I did meet some lovely Dutch people who are kind and caring and i will be visiting them in the future
