As a Dutch person studying an international study you quite often hear how weird the Dutch culture can be. For the Dutch people it may be normal but for the outside world we are a strange country. We summed up some of the most peculiar things we heard…

When you meet someone from your family or when it is someone’s birthday you give them three kisses on the cheek. It usually goes; right cheek, left cheek, right cheek and things can get quite awkward if you don’t expect them.

The Dutch like to live by the diary, we plan every little thing, even a quick coffee date, grocery run and dinner, since we always eat around 5/6PM. The Dutch are also always on time, well, most of them…

BIKING IS OUR CULTURE. The Dutch probably have bikes going through their veins, we do everything by bike, and since we are so advanced at it, we don’t even need helmets.

In the Dutch culture we have a saying that goes “Recht voor z’n raap”. We don’t talk around it, we say how it goes and cut to the chase.

The Dutch are cheap, we want every cent back and we even invented ‘Tikkie’ to get it back. Because we want every cent back, we also developed an eye for a bargain and can get stuff for the lowest price.

We have a thing for trivia, we love a good game night and the tv is full with game shows such as ‘Ik hou van Holland’ and ‘Eén tegen 100’.

It is a tradition that you sit in a circle on your birthday with your family and friends and eat cheese with little flags in it and meat. It also is tradition that you bring treats for everyone when it is your birthday and not the other way around.

The Dutch people are very abstemious (nuchter), we (most of the time) do not care if a famous person is standing next to us and if you get famous you better behave normal and not like a drama queen.

We LOVE to talk about the weather, it is in our daily routine. Whether it is to cover an awkward silence or because you are actually interested about the weather, either way the weather here is always shitty.

Don’t get scared if you hear an alarm on a Monday, we like testing things so to prepare for an actual emergency, every first Monday of the month an alarm goes off, and we all ignore it.

The alarm is not the only noise we like to make, on New Year’s eve we celebrate with a lot of bangs. Beautiful colours but also loud bangs.

Every year on the 27th of April the whole country turns orange, we love a good celebration and this celebration is for the King, Willem, well it is originally, we just like a good party.

The food, we have some very interesting food in our little country, like stroopwafels or ‘syrup waffle’ which is just as it sounds a waffle with syrup inside of it, a true hit. A not so famous treat from people outside the country is liquorice, a very sour but very delicious black treat. There is also an interesting place called the FEBO where you can get fast food from the wall, the wall.