My Dutch Dream

I prefer to call this post Dutch “Ettiquette” rather than “Manners”, you will soon see why.

Anyway, one of the fascinating things about living or even visiting another country is to see how differently things are done. I’m sure you’ll agree and have experienced it yourself.

So something unique I have seen here is when you go shopping that they will use the divider at the end of the checkout. So as soon as the person before you has payed for their goods then yours will immediately be thrown down the opposite side! If someone were to do this in England then it would be viewed as very rude.

But clearly it is more efficient to do this. In fact, if anything, when you think about it, it actually affords each person more time to do their packing.

Another thing I noticed here is that at least 80% of cyclists stop at the lights, even if there is a clear road ahead! I’m used to “breaking the law” in the UK and ignoring the lights and moving so long as the way is clear. Maybe this happens here in NL because there are so many bikes, or maybe some people get fined? Someone even told me that you could get a 40 Euro fine for not wearing lights on your body at night when out riding but I think this is BS because I’ve seen only a few with these.

Of course, giving a hand signal when on your bike here is normal but that is clearly because it is common sense with so many other bikes around.

While we’re on the subject of bikes, I’ve noticed that motorists go out of their way to give way to cyclists, even if they don’t have to. I’ve been trying to cross the road to the opposite bike lane many times on my bike and had traffic stop before me to let me through, even though they were not obliged to and had a ton of traffic behind them. This is something that you will almost never see back in the UK unless you are on a very quiet back street, never on the main road.

By the way, I have purchased some of these infamous Dutch “drop” flavoured sweets recently. If you look at any supermarket here, half of their sweets section will be dedicated to these! Contrary to what I have heard before, I don’t believe that these are uniquely Dutch, in fact I have tasted this flavour before in the British sweets known as midget gems – the black ones taste exactly the same as drops. And yes, frankly they are awful, I can see why drops usually come in a mixed form e.g. combination wine gum, mint etc., because it seems that very few people are prepared to eat 100% drops continuously!

I also saw something in Albert Heijn that made me laugh. We have in England what we call “licorice allsorts” which are pretty tasty and quite sparing in licorice. Anyway, you can buy them in Albert Heijn but they call them “Engelse Drops”! That made me chuckle!

Oh, on the paperwork front, I tried to enquire about health insurance yesterday (the choice is so complicated and the prices so similar anyway, I just went with a recommendation in the end, Zilveren Kruis, if for nothing else the fact they have a lot of information in English). The good news is that it can all be done over the phone. The bad news is that I can’t do anything without the BSN. With registration on Monday, it’s gonna be at least a week till I get it in the post, so annoying! In the UK (a place I’ve never thought of as efficient at all, quite the opposite), a recently arrived immigrant can get their National Insurance number within a day by comparison.