deep insights
A student with lip piercing stares into the house.
"You'll like the apartment," the broker said, key-slapping. "In the middle of the old town! Holzbalken! And here"? the double doors swung open? "the living room: flooded with light!" In fact, how did the Dutch sun blink in the room? and besides her also a lanky student with lip piercing. In his arms he held a girl with a henna, and they both stared in at us, just as one happens to be staring at sparrows in the street, or a dented Passat. Us and the young couple on the sidewalk separated about three steps of parquet and the window front? double glazed, after all.
Who watches whom?
I had to think of the transparent orangutan enclosures in the local zoo, and I was really not sure if we were observers or observed. "And?" The broker asked radiantly. "Hmmpffrm," my husband replied, it should sound approving. You do not want to offend anyone, just because you're new, German and prefer dinner without a spectator.
Houses in Holland show the privacy
We then moved to an attic apartment. And on my spy walks, I soon realized why one skimmed so close to other people's private lives only in Holland. The English have front gardens. The Italians have mezzanine floors and in Naples wrought-iron grates in front of the windows. We Germans have one or the other? but in any case roller blinds or thick curtains. Only in the Dutch, the public space seamlessly merges into the private sphere: only separated from immensely large windows, polished bare and at eye level.
Behind it, jogging wearers loung on sofas, ironing laundry in baskets, throwing kids at small blocks. Through a kitchen in the Harlemmerstraat usually flies a free-running rabbit. On the Rapenburg Canal, the greeting cards for the birth of Yannick are draped on the window sill so that anyone interested can read along. And friends of us even spy across the neighboring apartment a piece of the next channel? at least when the landlord is not sitting at the dining table.
Here is liberality and openness.
Now, as I said, you do not want to constantly cringe. It's very progressive, I told myself. No veiling curtains, but liberality and openness. No one hid the laundry basket in the bedroom here, just because unannounced visitors burst in. No, here one stands to its disorder, to questionable cactus collections and to the love for miserable Soap operas, which flicker out nightly on the sidewalks.
Tradition against secrets
So I almost dismantled my tentatively attached curtain rods, out of enthusiasm and because one should adapt to the good customs of the host country. But then my friend Marijke explained to me: What seems so progressive to me is just an old tradition. "The fact that curtains are not closed comes from Calvinism," she claimed. "The neighbor should see that nothing sinful happens in the house."
The explanation did not convince me. Why should the Dutchmen stick to this remnant? even more, where you are anything but prude here today? (I can judge that, we have a dorm opposite.) But above all, the show-window story is a contradiction in terms: With all openness you can not look open in any case! Even small children are taught that you do not star in foreign windows. Who decency, marches past the brightly lit scenarios, without looking for a second. Otherwise he is probably a nerd - or a foreigner.
Houses in Holland are secretly looked at
That's the theory. Of course, people watch out, out of the corner of their eyes, the Dutch are very good at it. What you see is pretty different. There are two streams, so to speak, and they have about as much in common with each other as Gouda with Sardinian pecorino.
There are two style factions.
Sofa-lemmler, disorder and freewheeling hare are signs of the me-but-no-faction. Their motto: After all, we have not asked anyone to look into our messy apartment, right? No, even brightly lit two-fifty-fifty windows without a curtain are not an invitation to do so. On the other hand, the followers of the countercurrent want to show everyone how beautiful they are. Do you usually live on canals and in historic gabled houses? like in this corner house on Pieterskerkplatz, which was recently renovated. Pearwood shelves with their precious leather straps stretched to the ceiling, designer lamps shone, and on the walls glued Brocattapeten with lilies pattern. But above all, there was not a single dirty teacup, not an old newspaper? anything that was personal and not perfect.
The real life is hidden on the first floor
"Look, the books, they open a second hand bookshop," I announced while walking. ? "This is a living room," my husband said. ? "Never," I said. Several evenings went this way, until at some point at half past twelve a man in slippers groped his way through the room and disappeared on the first floor. Because the housing exhibitionists live exclusively. And one rumors, up there they would have children with adhesive hangings, open wine bottles and? Yup! ? even crumbs on the sofa.
