The Expat Unfriendly Netherlands

Hard to make friends, difficult to learn the local language, fit into the local culture and integrate into the local community. Does this sound like your expat life in the Netherlands?

According to the Expat Explorer Survey carried out for HSBC Bank International the Netherlands placed last out of 25 countries, making it the most expat unfriendly country you could hope for.

Only 36% of expats relocating to the Netherlands find it easy to make friends here and 55% have concerns about the barriers that the local language put up. According to the survey, expats find the Dutch culture hard to fit in to and integrating in to the local community is far from easy here.

The difficulty of making friends in the Netherlands, particularly with the locals, is a common expat forum topic. Learning the language is a common talking point too but for the Netherlands to score so badly on these points did surprise me.

On the other hand, I did feel like shouting  "You see!" to someone who once posted a comment on an article I wrote for the Telegraph. A reader going by the name of "Kingory" commented,

"The Netherlands is about the easiest place in the world to be an expat, the language is really easy if you can hack the pronunciation, English is widely spoken, less than an hour east of London, there are loads of expats there already, and they even have the UK BBC for God's sake!!

Kind of missing the point about trying to integrate I think, but nonetheless you would think that a move to a far flung destination would be tougher than a move to a Western European country.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Have you experienced problems getting your social life on track after moving to the Netherlands? Is the culture too much to adapt to? Do the survey results surprise you or confirm your feelings?

A Little Help in the Delivery Room for Expats: Doulas

Having a baby in a foreign country can be quite daunting and if your mum and your best friend live back in your country of origin then having your nearest and dearest around you at such an emotional time can be very hard to plan. However, hiring a doula can help - for many many reasons. A doula is someone who provides support (non-medical) during pregnancy, labour and the birth. For the birth of my second baby, I had a doula on hand and I would recommend it to anyone!!

If you want to know more, read an article I wrote for I Am Expat about my experience with a doula.

Duality - Life as an Expat

"I am two different people for two different audiences," commented one reader of my recent guest post "How Do You Say.... Me?" on Expat Harem.

My post addressed the issue of being able to let the real you shine through when you are interacting with people in a second language. It is a difficulty that many expats face, and the comments from readers were overwhelming. So many of us endure the same struggles of showing our real personality when the words to express ourselves escape us.

"I can't express the totality of me in English," summed up another reader. 

Expat Sarah Turnbull, in her book Almost French, states after a dinner party,

"I’d said very little all night. When I did speak, it was to issue childlike statements or ask simple questions which made me cringe at my own dumbness.”

This rang a bell with one reader of the blog post,

"I had to laugh at the "cringe at my own dumbness" quote because I find myself constantly doing that here in Italy."

Whilst many of us know the problems associated with learning a new language, this blog post made me realise that there is an undercurrent of issues too when you need to operate in a new language. It is not just grammar, getting by in daily life and understanding the society you live in - it is also about being able to feel like you represent yourself accurately and that you can be true to yourself and your persona in another language.

So how else can you get your message across when you can't find the words?

"Because the Turks are so expressive with their body language I think that really helps me to be more demonstrative if the word escapes me," explains one expat in Turkey.

Another expat says,

"I'm a smiler so I do that a lot! And I try to speak with my hands.... and my hubby can translate but its not the same."

You can of course refuse to budge and speak only in your native language but remember that whilst you are doing that, you are addressing an audience in a language not their own. So do they really get what you are about when you speak in your mother tongue?

There is no easy answer but as Anastasia Ashman puts it,

"Passion is something that will push us to the next stage in trying to communicate." And if there is something that most of us expats have - it's passion!!


*This was first published in February 2010 in an Expats@Home newsletter. If you want to receive future editions of my newsletter you can sign up on this blog (see right column) or http://www.thewritingwell.eu/Newsletter.html.*

A Dutch Decade: Q&A with Jo Parfitt

As part of the Dutch Decade week I threw the floor open to you to ask any question you liked about expat life or life in the Netherlands.....

Jo Parfitt, expat author, entrepreneur, speaker, teacher, mentor, coach and general writing guru, asked,

Jo Parfitt

"They say that after about 2 years abroad there is no going back, that you are now permanently changed and that from now on, wherever you live the grass will be greener. Do you now feel that, happily and completely this is your home, or do you have "grass is greener" moments? Please tell me about the state of your integration".

My Answer: I am not sure about the validity of after 2 years there is no going back; after ten years I think that is most definitely the case. For the first few years I lived in the Netherlands, whenever I travelled back to England I had the feeling that I was going home. In later years that reversed and as soon as we board the ferry or train back to Holland it feels like I am heading home.

I still miss my friends and family back in England and that will never change, but when we go back there I feel like a visitor and not a native. And that is not strange after a decade away.

That is not to say I don’t have my ‘grass is greener’ moments – some things in the Netherlands irk me and there are occasions you will hear me say, “You wouldn’t have this problem in England.” But of course, no matter where you live there are things you don’t like and at the end of the day England and the Netherlands are not poles apart like some cultures are.

I feel well assimilated into Dutch society - I am married to a Dutchman so I have had to  but I remain English and will never be a true local. So in a way, living overseas for ten years means that you live in the no man’s land between being an expat and being a local.

Photo: Myles Davidson

I speak Dutch to a reasonable standard (at least nobody tries to speak English to me anymore when I am out and about), I understand a good deal about Dutch culture and what makes the Dutch tick. I have a birthday calendar in my downstairs toilet, my potato masher is well used in the winter and I get enthusiastic about the national football team; I do my best to integrate. However, there are some things, no matter how long I live here for, that I will not adopt or accept as the norm: birthday circles and bad customer service.

Does your host country feel like your home now or do you still have a feeling of coming home when you travel back to your country of origin?

Are you an Expat Type Two? Or is it Just me?

Tying into my Dutch Decade theme, I have written a guest blog post for Expat Harem entitled 'Expat Type Two'. When I was thinking about the fact that I have been in the Netherlands now for ten years, have a family here, have no plans to return to England and actually love my life here, I asked myself if I actually considered myself as an expat.

The answer was no. And then I realised that while the official definition of an expat fits me, I have never really felt like I was an expat as such. There are different types of expat. I'm an expat type two, or not an expat at all.....

"When I first moved overseas I was struck that some expats are more equal than others. We all live in countries and cultures other than where we were brought up, or have legal residence. The difference lies in the “temporarily or permanently residing” part of the definition.........." Read more over at Expat Harem.

Ten Years in the Netherlands

Photo by Patrick Lebeda

Today marks the ten year anniversary of my arrival in the Netherlands. Ten years ago today, I moved with everything I owned piled in the back of a trailer to take up residence in an unknown land, an unfamiliar setting. It was a huge step. I started life as an expat.

However, at some point in the last ten years, it has snuck up on me, and quite frankly taken me by surprise. Suddenly the Netherlands feels like home.

When I go back to England, I feel like I have walked into a house I once lived in. It all seems familiar yet it is no longer my home.

 The kitchen is in the same place it always was. The living room, albeit with a different shade on the walls and a new carpet, bears a resemblance to the room I once kicked off my shoes and relaxed in after a hard day at the office. And yes, the bathroom is the same, yet the unfamiliar shower curtain bugs me and there are toiletries littered on the shelves that I do not use. The garden brings back fond memories of English summers, BBQ’s with friends and lazy afternoons on the lawn. However, I never planted that row of conifers, and roses blossom where I used to keep my patio chairs.

I know it is a house I have lived in, it breeds familiarity, but someone came in and redecorated. Somebody rearranged the furniture, planted new shrubs and flowers and erased the little touches that made it my place. I know my way around but it is clear I don’t live there anymore.

An English Pub (Photo:Bill Graham)

When we drive through the rolling English countryside I realise I miss hills and a landscape that provides variety. When I am pushing my trolley around the one-stop supermarket, it reinforces my yearning to shop every week surrounded by such choice and variety.  When we pass a traditional English pub, tucked back on a country road tempting the passer-by with Sunday roast dinners, I cannot deny happy memories flood back, and the desire to have such a stop-off on my doorstep again is overwhelming.

However, when I am back in England I feel like a visitor. It is no longer my home. People I love live there but I no longer have a base there. When we get into our car and make our way back to Dover to catch the Eurotunnel over to mainland Europe, or head to Harwich to get the ferry back to Hoek van Holland I know I am heading home.

What do you get if you Cross an Expat Expert, a video camera and You Tube?

What you get is a great series of on-line lectures for expats by Robin Pascoe.

Robin Pascoe, the expat expert and author of expat books such as "A Broad Abroad", "A Moveable Marriage" and "Raising Global Nomads" has a great video series available called Successful Living Abroad.

It's all in the title - a series of 18 videos tackling universal challenges for expats in bite-size chunks. Topics centre on finding your own identity as an expat spouse, the place of third culture kids in the world, the importance of global nomads and the importance of the family abroad.

In the video below Robin tells why she has developed this on-line lecture series:



Robin really is an expert in her field and a highly respected speaker and writer - if you are abroad, or about to move abroad, check out this series.

Expat Coaching, World Cup Football and Life in the Netherlands

I do a lot of communicating on Twitter and Facebook but neglected to share links of my latest published articles here. So to put that right......

• Getting help to live your best life abroad: an article published by Expatica about expat coaches and how they can help those living abroad. To sum the article up: "A little help along the way can be all too welcome. Amanda van Mulligen speaks to three professionals who help expats deal with issues related to life abroad."

• I am delighted to share that an article of mine was published in an international newspaper. "Published every Wednesday, The Telegraph Weekly World Edition provides a unique and comprehensive summary of the week's top news and comment from around the world, with in-depth coverage of politics, business, sport, and the arts." It is a newspaper with an expat section and this is where you can find "Going Dutch with a New Year Bang" in Issue 989. It is also available online under the title "Adapting to Expat Life in the Netherlands."

• The expat section of The Telegraph also published the article I wrote following Holland's defeat in the World Cup Final: "World Cup 2010: a view from the Netherlands

Guest Post Series: My Holland by Marianne Orchard

The highlight of my life in Holland was a Sunday morning. We woke up in the house we had just bought, the first house we had ever bought, to the sound of bells from the town hall. We were right in the centre of town.

The house was still empty – we hadn’t moved in properly yet – so we got up and walked the few minutes it took to reach a café and sat outside at one of the tables on the boats moored in the water. Ever since I first visited Leiden I had wanted to live there and now I was, right in the centre.

The lowlight is the reverse of this. It was pulling the door shut to our house in Leiden for the last time. It was hearing those bells from the town hall for the last time. It was walking across the square and looking back at our street leading off the corner of the square and realising that it no longer was our street. We would no longer sit outside our house with a glass of wine in the evening and give directions to passing tourists. We were moving to a house with a garden.

Having moved away from Leiden I have found another Holland. I wake up to hear birds singing rather than bikes rattling and seagulls and students squawking. I live in a house with a driveway, two driveways in fact. There are woods nearby. We have countryside. There are children at school whose parents are farmers.

The Holland I live in now – a village up north – is a different Holland from the Holland where I used to live. People here mistrust ‘het westen’. ‘Wasn’t there lots of crime?’ they ask if I say I lived there. They leave their homes and get into their cars. They drive to school. They drive to the shops. They drive. They drive. They drive.

The car-on-your-driveway Holland, the having-a-driveway Holland, the safe no-one-on-the-streets-in-the-evening-except-dog-walkers Holland, the return-to-a-quiet-village-at-the-end-of-your-busy-working-day-Holland is not my Holland.

My Holland is a historical town with houses from the Golden Age lining canals. My Holland is a bike chained up outside your house. My Holland is walking and cycling everywhere. It is people out on the street at night, people without dogs. It is sitting in the street rather than in your own garden.

That’s the thing about living in a foreign country. You think that the whole country is like where you’re living but it isn’t. Holland is not just cycles in front of your house. You can find cars and driveways and out of town superstores too. You can find quiet villages to drive home to at the end of a busy day. It’s just knowing how and where to find them.

What I’ve learnt since leaving Leiden and moving to the country is that your internal world is the one that is important. It’s about doing your thing regardless of your outside environment. It’s about having New York New York moments where you know that ‘if I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere’. That’s what living in another country is about.

Marianne Orchard writes about living in Holland, the Dutch language and learning Dutch at likeasponge.nl. She has lived in the Netherlands for long enough that she should say the Netherlands instead of Holland.

Guest Post Series: Where do I Belong? by Tiffany Jansen

Personally, I love living in the Netherlands. I love the area in which I live. I love learning the language. I love meeting people from different backgrounds and cultures. I love the rich history and the old buildings. I love the cycling culture, the personal freedom, the royal family. Though I could certainly do with less rain and longer days in the winter, there is very little that I

disapprove of or feel uncomfortable with in my new country. If anything, my Dutch husband has more of a desire to head back State-side than I do.

Now, it’s not that I don’t love my home country. I’m very proud of our new president and I am proud of the fact that we went from a fledgling nation to the most powerful country in the world. And I certainly miss family and friends and hobbies and pastimes that I left behind.

The other and probably more pressing reason is that I’m not sure I belong there anymore. I notice it more and more with each time I return for a visit or when family and friends come to see us in the Netherlands.

Sometimes it’s the big things. I don’t understand why only the wealthy are entitled to healthcare. It still boggles my mind that only a handful of States have legalized gay marriage. I disagree with the drinking age being so high and the driving age being so low. The fast-pace, no-rest, workaholic lifestyle makes me wonder why life expectancy in the US isn’t lower – all this pressure American society puts on its people can’t be healthy.

It’s also in the little things. The knife, for instance. I’m convinced that this utensil is headed for extinction in the United States. When we eat with my family or friends, their knives remain completely unsoiled. They never even pick them up. My husband and I ate at a restaurant in North Carolina over Christmas that had no knives whatsoever.

To make a long story short, the longer I stay here, the less I belong there. I’m changing and seeing things differently and having all these new experiences that can only be had by living in another country. Seeing friends and family so seldom means that we move on without each other and in different directions. We can never be as close as we used to be. How can we? Skype, Facebook, blogs, telephone and email can help tremendously, but they just can’t replace a one-on-one, in person relationship.

And as much as I’m adapting here and as much I really love life in the Netherlands, this will never really be my home. Not truly. Not completely. For starters, I’m not Dutch. When my Dutch friends sing tunes from Kinderen voor Kinderen, that’s something I can’t participate in. I just didn’t grow up with this show. If I retaliate by crooning songs from Kids Incorporated, I find myself doing it alone. Certain jokes I will never really understand. No matter how fluent in the language I become, it will still be more taxing than speaking English. Let’s face it: I’m not Dutch. Nor will I ever be.

I think the worst part of being an expat is that you get torn between two countries. Two lives, really. And certainly two homes. We humans hunger for a sense of belonging. But where exactly do I belong now?

Thanks to Tiffany Jansen for this contribution. You can read more about Tiffany on her blog sites:

http://clogsandtulips.blogspot.com

americancloggie@aol.com

Expats in (E)motion Blog

Debby Poort (interviewed on this blog last year and founder of Yellow Wood Integrative Psychotherapy Practice) and Kate Berger (founder of the Expat Kid's Club) have teamed up to write a blog for expats in the Netherlands that deals with mental health issues. In their own words:

"We created Expats in (E)motion because we believe that being an expat is an emotional journey–not just a physical relocation. As expats we are bombarded with new experiences every single day. With these new experiences come emotions, some we may have long forgotten we ever had, and some we never thought we would ever have to face."

Topics that these two experts tackle through the blog are:

-Making new friends
-Dealing with homesickness
-Maintaining health
-Learning to speak Dutch
-Having a new baby/sibling
-Preparing for repatriation

Go to http://expatsinemotion.blog.com/ for more information and to read their blog.

Home for the Holidays?

Whether you are heading back to your home country for the Christmas period or spending the festive season in your 'host' country, this time of year can bring a range of emotions with it. If you are spending the period without your closest family (especially for the first time) because you live overseas, it can make a joyous time of year a difficult one.

I have tried over the years to incorporate both my own Christmas traditions and Dutch elements of the celebration - in short, to make the best of both worlds. Inevitably, this means alternating where we spend Christmas - one year in England and the next here in the Netherlands.

Last year we broke with that and spent Christmas in Disneyland Paris. Combining new and old traditions and rituals can help you adapt to the festive season as an expat - the fact is that things are different at Christmas time once you leave your home country for a life overseas but it doesn't mean it has to be less fun.

To feel such conflicting emotions is quite normal as an expat and there are ways to cope. For a host of tips and advice on this topic check out Debby Poort's new Expats in (E)motion blog - it is packed with helpful words for this time of year.

Photo: Wong Mei Teng (http://foodientravelbug.blogspot.com)