Aprovechando que estoy de Erasmus, voy a empezar a subir algunos posts sobre mi experiencia aquí. Creo que alguno será para clase, así que tendrán que ser en inglés. Aquí va el primero sobre la diferencia cultural que más me haya sorprendido entre este país y España.
Utrecht
has not been the first city of Netherlands that I have visited. My first time
in this country was in summer when I came on holidays with my family. In that
week visiting the nation I noticed many cultural differences between the
Netherlands and Spain, my country.
As
we were here we dropped by the principal cities: Amsterdam, Den Hague,
Rotterdam and Delft, but also little villages as Middelburg, Volendam and Edam,
for instance. I define my person as a curious one that is why when I go to a
new place I like to see how citizens live there. My surprise came when I looked
at one house and I could see the inside part, there were no curtains. I was able
to see how a family was preparing the dinner or how another family was in the
sofa watching the television peacefully while I was staring at them totally
surprised.
The guide explained me that in
Netherlands exists the believe of «no hiding». The Dutch people think that they
don´t have anything that they must hide. This is totally opposed to what is
“the normal behaviour” in my country.
An example of a Dutch house
In Spain we are selfish of our own privacy, we don´t like people staring at our windows and watching what we are doing inside. But this does not mean that we want to hide something, it is only that we want to be peacefully, because many times, Spanish people are so gossip. However, I think that for Dutch people the windows of their houses are the shop windows of their life. They want to be presented to the rest of the world as they are, with transparency and total honesty.
We
can find an example of this thinking not only in Dutch houses but also in the
cathedral of Utrecht. In the altar of the church there is an open helmet, a
symbolism of sincerity, the transparency of a person. This means, that this
concept is not something new, it has been a Dutch tradition since the very
beginning of the country.
This
is the main difference, or at least the one that more surprises me, that I have
noticed between this two countries. I find impressive how such a daily life
habit can be so contrasting in two nations that are from the same continent.
