Liberty Cooper, Plus3 The Netherlands Summer 2024
During my two-week stay in the Netherlands, my classmates from Pitt and I interacted with lots of locals. Our study abroad program was organized by a travel agency, so we met with businesses, professors, students, and museum workers in addition to organically meeting locals by getting food or shopping. In general, I found Dutch retail and restaurant employees to be much more standoffish than those in the United States. They weren’t rude, but they also weren’t friendly. While it is common in the U.S. for service sector employees to smile and say “hi, how are you” to their customers, both of those actions are pretty uncommon among the Dutch. From the Dutch people I’ve spoken to, I have learned that they think it isn’t natural or genuine to smile and ask someone how they are doing when you have only just met them. I suppose that is true (when I greet customers in the hair salon I work at, I normally don’t know enough about them to truly care about how they are doing), but, as an American, I still appreciate the gesture of greeting people warmly, if superficially. In the Netherlands, it is more common for servers or cashiers to simply do their jobs without any unnecessary chatting. That is okay, too, but it took some getting used to and some embarrassment in situations in which I wanted to talk to my server much more than they wanted to talk to me.
There was a positive side to the Dutch being so genuine when interacting with strangers: when they were excited to talk to my fellow students and I, they made it clear! During our company and museum visits, we met some Dutch people who were obviously excited to meet us and share their culture with us. For instance, we visited a chocolate shop owned by a woman whose husband kindly offered to take us on a tour of their neighborhood in Amsterdam. He spent a long time with us, showing us his favorite shops and restaurants. When he took us past a cheese shop, the owner went out of his way to invite us in for a quick tasting. Those two locals were very unexpectedly kind and anxious to show off their beautiful country.
According to the tour guide from the travel agency that planned our trip, the Dutch typically encounter two types of Americans: the stereotypical obnoxious, stupid, disrespectful Americans and nice, positive, smart Americans who are excited to learn about their culture. I believe that such thinking may explain why I have two very different feelings about the locals I met. Those who expected me to be rude and uninterested treated me the way they expected me to treat them. Those people were typically restaurant servers or store owners who probably do encounter lots of disrespectful tourists. On the other hand, the people who knew we were university students on a study abroad trip (that is, anyone who gave us a preplanned tour, such as the man from the chocolate shop) treated us like the intellectual, kind people that they expected us to be (and that we are).
As I mentioned, my trip to the Netherlands was pretty short, but we still got to meet a few university students. They volunteered to show us around their campus, so I would not say that I actually made a friend from a college in my host country. Regardless, the rest of my group and I got to know the two students, and we even met them later on our trip for dinner. They were just as excited to talk to us about our college lives as we were to hear about theirs!
In conclusion, I had a lot of very different interactions with locals during my trip. Overall, I think Americans are more friendly than the Dutch, but that doesn’t mean that Dutch people cannot be kind. By the end of my trip, I found that if I showed locals that I was kind and respectful, they would be kind back.
The picture below shows us with a few professors from the InHolland University Rotterdam Campus giving us a very enthusiastic tour of the campus and the surrounding neighborhood!
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