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A friends statement on Culture shock when visiting the Netherlands:

“Prefacing this with the fact that I only went to Amsterdam and not any other Dutch city, but there we’re still a lot of small culture shocks as an American.

I think the biggest thing was the level of freedom people had, and how everyone respected that freedom if it didn’t interfere with people's lives. The whole city is a protected historic area so companies can’t just buy the old houses and tear them down to build new things, and they respect ownership super deeply. The reason the city doesn’t have a lot of homeless people on the streets is because of the squatter laws and there are entire homes not really owned by anyone. They belong to someone at some point but after WW2 a lot of houses couldn’t be tracked to their owners but they didn’t belong to a firm or the city so they just sat there, and now those empty houses are filled with small communities of homeless people and the city respects them and doesn’t kick them out. I can't even imagine a thing like that here, but also they have legal weed, shrooms, prostitution, etc. but it’s all heavily regulated so you can do it, but only in specific ways. Weed shops are also coffee shops and can’t sell any kind of oil product or bud, but can sell joints and stuff. you can do whatever you want just as long as you’re not overdoing it and that’s why they regulate it. There's also a sex sauna that exists where people can pay money to just go have consensual protected sex with strangers and it’s all clean and regulated so if people want that, they can do it safely. it’s definitely something else.

Different kinds of culture shock but everyone there smokes cigarettes and drinks beer constantly. Cigarette butts are all over the streets. It's an old thing from the plague where rats didn’t like the smell of smoke and the virus died in alcohol so people who smoked and drank were “healthy”. But on the other side of that their grocery stores are way better quality. There's barely any prepackaged food and a lot of it is for cooking meals. The produce is so flavorful and looks just really good. We saw on the train going there that they have really massive greenhouses where they make all of their food in the country to avoid importing it, and grow things year round. And the groceries were really cheap. Getting a handful of snacks and a meal was like 8 £. The grocery stores are also tiny, nothing like a Walmart or even a Winco. They just didn’t have as much packaged food.

There's also a real sense of community there where everyone works together to keep the city nice. The city went through a lot of trials both starting out and still are (the city is sinking right now) and they keep just moving forward and finding solutions to problems that don’t impact others too much but solves the problem. It’s very much a “you do you and I do me” kind of culture and I appreciated it.

Like everyone is individual, but everyone still comes together to do things people can’t do by themselves.

The lack of car culture was also a shock. The bike culture there is really big and you would see like, 70yo grandmas on bikes or business men in clean cut suits on bikes, or women carrying two toddlers on bikes like it was a real thing. Apparently they pull out 11,000 bikes out of the canals each year. Any building had like 50 bikes in front of it so it made sense. Also because bikes get stolen there’s special bikes they make where you need a key in it to make it work, like a car but just to unlock it. And any bikes you saw with that system tampered on it was stolen.

So. many. bikes.

On the ferry we took to get to the main city on our side there were probably like 200-300 bikes parked there. And a lot of them just stay there because if no one claims them they just sit. People don’t generally mess with other people's stuff and if they do it’s because no one is using it anymore"