Observations About The Netherlands
A message from a reader
Freshly returned from my appearance on English Breakfast radio this morning, I received a message from a reader who was brought up in the Netherlands and now lives in the UK. It made me laugh so I thought I’d share her observations about the Netherlands with you.
A reader writes her observations about the Netherlands
I have been reading quite a lot of your posts and I must say you are hilarious and I completely understand your English humour maybe is it because I have been living in the Northern region of the UK for quite a while.
The reason why I am contacting you is that I have been raised in the Netherlands but have moved to the UK quite a few years ago and because of that I can’t stop comparing the Dutch with the Brits. Although both countries are neighbours they are worlds apart. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed.
Firstly the first thing I have seen is the lack of women smoking in the UK and you were spot on with the fact that Dutch woman love nothing more than having a fag.
But Anouk, you’re Dutch you’re supposed to smoke!
I recently went back to the Netherlands and I felt my eyes have been opened I always thought the Dutch were some perfect kind of breed (lol) how wrong was I?
Things that annoyed me when I went back to the Netherlands
- dog shit everywhere
- plastic bags were not free, I am used to getting as much plastic bags from Tesco as I wanted
- toilets were no longer free
- freezing cold water in the bathroom, what’s up with that?
- lack of manners
- pushing and queue skipping
- ETC
One other thing I have noticed, the Brits love getting dressed up when going out to party at night, it doesn’t matter if they are carrying a couple of extra kilos they will still wear their little black dress with painfully high heels, the Dutch, on the other hand, will dress down just like you mentioned with their favourite old jeans and converse trainers.
Can you write about one thing which I find to be most hilarious, it is when Dutch woman reaches a certain age lets say around 30 they find it necessary to completely cut off their hair (google, pittig kapsel) and start wearing a very tiny backpack, you would not see the difference between the sexes you think it is a guy until she starts speaking, go to youtube and type in ‘‘koefnoen ipie” she is the stereotypical Dutch woman it is a parody.
No women with pittig kapsels were hurt during the writing of this post.