#1: Eating bread (all - the - time)
Let's start with this innocent cultural difference - if you come from literally anywhere in the world except from the Netherlands, you might be really surprised how much pastry is consumed in the lowlands. What's more, they enjoy sandwiches with literally anything for lunch. Personally I find this very convenient, but I can imagine this being a little hard to adjust to, especially for fellow Slavs being used to heavy warm lunches.
#2: Hagelslag
Speaking of putting anything on your bread, the finest Dutch invention would be hagelslag. Putting chocolate sprinkles on a bread might seem really strange, but it somehow works. Thanks to the Dutch dedication, you can find a generous shelf space in every supermarket, dedicated to hagelslag of different shapes, sizes and colours. What a time to be alive!
#3: Swearing with diseases
This one is pretty self explanatory I guess. The Dutch have no shame - if you make them angry, they will wish you cancer (or any other deadly disease that you can think of). What a lovely bunch, huh? However, within almost half a year of living in the Netherlands I still haven't managed to anger anyone so much that they would wish me a deadly disease. They do have a pretty dark humor too though, but that's a whole another story.
#4: Having a word for everything
People say that it is the Germans who have a word for everything, but I personally think it's the Dutchies who run the world in this area. You might have heard of the 100 different Dutch words for rain, but that's just a top of the iceberg. Leaving aside the tons of words that the Dutch have to describe literally any phase of a relationship, there is also a word for a traffic accident in which at least one of the parties was on their phone. By the way, this word was recently voted to be the word of the year - yup, that's a thing. This word, 'appongeluk', is joining the finest selection of words with the "word of the year" title, like for example 'swaffelen'. I will let you google this one at your own risk...
#5: Vending machines fast food
In case you are not familiar with typical Dutch food, let me give you a short heads up: these people LOVE deep fried stuff. I am talking fries, croquettes, sort of meatballs (bitterballen) and basically anything that can be deep fried. And when we all thought fast food cannot get any better, the Dutch came up with a way to purchase it without actually having to talk to people. For an euro or two you can get any of the above mentioned Dutch perfections. If you like your food with a little mystery, you're gonna love these as noone really knows how long the food has been there.
#6: Biercantus
The best for the last - in case you have never heard of biercantus (or beer cantus), explaining what it is will probably be pointless, it has to be experienced. It is basically nothing more than singing and drinking beer (lots of beer to be precise). But joined together, accompanied by a live band and good friends, it turns into the best thing that you can possibly experience. Biercantus is organised all over the Netherlands and even in some other countries, but Brabant and especially Tilburg is where the real deal happens. Every student club has its own cantus, even the university organises one and on top of it all there is TOP cantus before every semester, where the number of participants goes to thousand(s). People in here simply know how to party!
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