Smoking
While I'm a little more sanguine about this generally, I'm now possessed by a new mania - parental concern. I'm resigned to the fact that literally most people I pass in the street here are smoking - but when they blow that smoke over my obviously heavily-pregnant partner, I bridle. Interestingly the number of smoking pregnant women I see here is at least as low as Australia, but I despair at the number of people smoking heavily around their strollers and toddlers. On balance I'd say that my frustration has evolved, but remains at a consistent level.
Dog shit
One of our biggest eye-openers in NL has been the regional diversity, despite the country's small size. Living in Rotterdam was a very different experience to where we are now - in Leiden we've made exponentially more friends, found a surprising number of Aussie ex-pats, even found vastly more places to eat out. This seems to be a combination of Leiden's status as a university town and it's significantly different position in the socio-economic landscape - which is visible in even very prosaic aspects of the city, like street cleanliness.
As an example, Rotterdam's lower-middle-class neighbourhoods offered large, communal, industrial-looking rubbish disposal sites (big containers recessed into the street) and, as previously mentioned, host a lot of large dogs that regularly foul the streets. Leiden, by contrast, has a policy of residents placing their bags of garbage on the street within a few hours of the four-times-weekly evening visit by the garbage trucks -and the pet community is (and the pets themselves are) quite small.
It's difficult to generalize about the cultural differences between these two environments, but I do have one observation - in Rotterdam, the large, functional-but-ugly bins are regularly clogged from misuse, where as the Leiden system (with it's implicit trust in the community-mindedness of residents) results in neat stacks of garbage bags, placed as inoffensively as possible near the public bins. The sense of communal responsibility which results, in my opinion, more than balances the disadvantages (time sensitivity of pickup, seagulls attacking the garbage bags.)
To sum up - I'd still recommend that you avoid the grass in NL, but be aware that there can be a very large culture difference from one city (or neighbourhood) to another.
'Coffee Milk'
Switching jobs has made a huge difference to this. My old role at a very Dutch company really highlighted the culture difference I was experiencing, at it's worst giving me a definite sense of alienation. My new role at a very international company (and its location in the middle of Amsterdam) has almost completely reversed this - case in point, instead of the traditional broodje met kaas (boring cheese sandwiches elevated only by the variety of cheeses available) I'm about to go out for gourmet hamburgers with another Aussie ex-pat. :)
This really reinforces my comments above - the Netherlands is so diverse that you sometimes feel like it several city-states welded together (something similar to the Semi-United Squabbling Countries of the USA) and if one part doesn't suit your tastes, maybe another will.
Personal Space
Working in Amsterdam has gone a long way to inuring me to traffic chaos - I no longer think twice about entering the swerving mass of pedestrians, cars and diverse variations on the theme of 'bike' that is a Dutch city's arteries. My frustration about personal space has been sustained, though - while I'm less bothered by other passengers desire to sit close to me, I've developed a growing frustration at train doors and on escalators. Despite PSAs and international derision, the Dutch continue to struggle with two very simple ideas:
- you can't get on to the train until I've cleared the door (which won't happen if you've all clustered, pushing and shoving, around the door I'm trying to exit by) - and
- escalators work best if slow traffic sticks to one side, letting fast traffic pass on the other. (Simple rule of thumb - slow traffic sticks to the same side of the escalator as the side of the road you drive your car on, so the right in NL, and the left in AU.)
Conclusion
We've been here for almost two years now - it's a shock to realise that. I guess I feel like I can finally say I've gotten a good taste of the culture, and can draw some real conclusions about whether I'd like to live here long term - and while I've never felt better about my living environment, working environment and even the people I've met here, I don't think this is where I'll retire. The real challenge is, though, that from this distance Australia doesn't feel like an ideal fit either, which leaves me more than a little rootless, and wondering about places like Ireland, or Canada. Whatever happens, I suspect eight cities in twelve months is just the beginning...
