Just have been reading a bit of “want to have a brake” articles at expatica.com and found something to add to my never-ending discussion about Dutch/being a foreigner in Holland discussion with friends and colleagues.
From Dutch women fight stereotypes in the workplace:
/”Turkey and Botswana, for example, have a larger percentage of women in management and the professions, especially academic positions (than the Netherlands)./” Jessica Silversmith, a director of the Meldpunt Discriminate Bureau
Another one, Dating the Dutch, seems to give a good portrait of relationships with Dutch people. At least it would be shared by my friends, but probably not by Russian-Dutch couples from RUS-NL forum.
It gives this strange feeling again: you live in the country, you somehow love it as a home (even temporary), but still you notice all kinds of strange things around that are different and most likely doesn’t make you happy. You can’t become Dutch, but you have to adjust… This brings a very strange feeling, mix of hate and love:
- they are different, I’m not like that and I don’t want to be,
- but I enjoy those “strange things” as part of living here, and most likely I will miss them at home (I wonder if I would miss biking in the rain :)
I can discuss a lot “those strange Dutch”, and it even looks that I don’t like it here. But for me it’s not like that: to be able to love you have to know and to understand. For me those discussions are never-ending attempts to understand Dutch and they bring some “strange love for the strange country and strange people”.
Tags: cross-cultural, NLArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/07/23.html#a56; comments are here.
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