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When I tell friends I spent four months this past spring and summer studying in the Netherlands, all it produces is a blank look, a shrug, and an ambiguous hand gesture which means: “Is that somewhere near Germany?”  But dropping the name of “Amsterdam” warrants a completely different reaction.  A sample conversation: “Hey, where did you go this spring?  John said that you said that you were studying abroad.  Where?” “In the Netherlands.” “Oh ok.” A shrug and crinkled eyebrows. “What language do they speak there?”  “Ah, Amsterdam’s the capital,” I say.  Eyes widen, lips purse into a drawn out “Oh” of recognition, followed by a slight conspiratorial smile.  I already know what the next question is going to be.  Amsterdam has become infamous for its tolerance. During summer break its hostels brim with herds of backpackers attracted by the lure of legal pot and the lore of the red light district. Though the sixteenth-century stone townhouses and the canals they line are unique to Holland, it’s the “coffee houses,” tattoo parlors, and gaudy sex shops - which occupy those buildings’ bottom floors - that draw tourists.  The Virgin Air in-flight magazine on a trip out of Brussels featured a list of “The top ten things to do in Amsterdam.” The article described traditional tourist sights - famous museums housing Van Goghs, Vermeers, and Rembrandts, the history of the Anne Frank house, people watching from the parks etc. But conspicuously in the middle of the list - number 7, “Get High.”

What I actually found was sadder, grayer, more business-like. 

The bikini-clad prostitutes perched on stools behind glass doors and parted curtains. Between customers they spoke on their cell phones, filed their nails, read magazines. Looked bored like a store clerk on a slow day. Some of the women were aging. Some, frankly, were more fat than curvy – the extra flesh spilling over the sides of their scant bathing suits. And most were immigrants, African, Middle Eastern – almost never blond-haired and Dutch. What I saw was, in fact, what prostitution looks like in reality – sad and degrading. The Netherlands is such a prosperous country, but by some great flaw in the social system women had fallen to this. The store-front style display of the prostitutes was shockingly unabashed and frank; as if Dutch society had simply given up trying to fix the problem, handed out condoms and business licenses and declared: “be safe, make do.” 
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But my program was not in Amsterdam, but in Utrecht a university town (pop. 300,000) about a forty-five minute train ride away.  In a country that is the size of New Jersey and as expensive as New York City, what sounds like a simple train ride became a trip I made only a handful of times.  In Utrecht, I still found the “coffee shops” and the bikini-clad bored-looking prostitutes. But Utrecht’s magic mushroom vendor, (Its window display features rainbow-colored gnomes perched on Astroturf.) resided between an antique shop and a store selling up-scale home decorating supplies. The red light district in Utrecht is located in a back-alley around the corner from the grocery my roommate and I frequented.  On my first day in Utrecht, I wandered outside of the grocery, still dazed by the adsorbent price of fresh vegetables, and I turned the corner by mistake. I found myself staring open-jawed at the “curvy” thong-clad women sitting in the window in front of me. I expected any minute for some righteous, but charitable church group to parade by shaking their fingers, scoop up the girls out of their windows, wrap them in blankets, and take them home for dinner. Blushing, I walked by stunned and tiptoed past the window of a 20 year-old Turkish woman applying lipstick. As I watched her, she did not acknowledge my presence, but simply stared at a point beyond me. As an outsider who has stayed in the country longer than a weekend stop over on a European Tour, I begin to wonder if Dutch tolerance has less to do with acceptance of others’ choices and more to do with shrewd business skills.  I hypothesized to my roommate that the legalization of the sale of soft drugs was an inventive form of niche tourism – the attraction that puts the otherwise modest city of Amsterdam on the backpacker radar. With a little more research and conversations with the Dutch I found that my theory bordered on truth.

But few outsiders understand the logic behind the policy, and the reputation the country has earned strikes a sour note with Dutch citizens. Ask a “Dutchie” about it and he or she will straighten huffily, and give the same curt angry remark: “everybody thinks that just because it is legal here, everyone smokes pot all of the time. But that’s not true.”  In fact, it proved difficult to find Dutch citizens who do actually take advantage of the policy of tolerance. 
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The Dutch drug policy fits in neatly with the culture’s philosophy that every citizen should be able to make their own decision about moral issues without interference from the government.  Since the Dutch learn from an early age always to think for themselves, even the classrooms have a completely different feel from the “shut up and sit down” mentality with which American students are raised. About to graduate from college, I still have problems speaking out in a class without first raising my hand, but Dutch students consume precious class time, disputing every aspect of the course from due dates, to the course load, to their opinions about the curriculum. Classes consist less of professors lecturing and students taking notes: the classes, rather,  appear more like prolonged debate.  Like most underlying cultural practices, this “I take care of myself-ism” has a historical – even religious – origin. Only a few decades ago, the Dutch segregated their society into “pillars,” divisions based upon religious affiliation. This meant that depending on what church one attended he or she would buy meat at the Calvinist butcher or bread at the Jewish baker. A Roman Catholic read the Catholic newspaper, socialized only with his or her Catholic neighbors, and sent his or her child to Catholic schools. The faiths did not intermingle, but neither did groups impose their beliefs upon others, causing the Netherlands to become a place of refuge for persecuted religious groups.  Though many Dutch are not religiously affiliated today, these ideas of segregation and tolerance persist.  In contrast to the Dutch, Americans are stereotyped as preachy and moralizing. Groups bent on setting moral standards for the rest of society persist in banning books, converting through television sermons, censoring movies, pushing the teaching of creationism in schools. But the Dutch fervently take the other stance. Even though they personally often object to the practice, they do not interfere or meddle. Perhaps their approach to controversial issues can be best summed up with a slogan I once saw on and American bumper sticker “Against Abortion? Than don’t have one.”  At the end of our first week of class, my exchange group, our Dutch mentors and the program director all took us to dinner.  When the bill came we found out that the program organizer had no intent of treating us but rather that she had specially chosen an inexpensive restaurant so that everyone could afford to pay for themselves.

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At home in the United States I might welcome this privacy, but as a stranger in the Netherlands I found the Dutch reserve stingy and unwelcoming. Never in my life, have I been so much an outsider; at points I felt less like an exchange student and more like a bewildered orphan. After class each day, as I walked home in the continuous fog of misty rain, I peered through the picture windows of the stern, stone townhouses. Each apartment’s large picture windows revealed immaculate but unlivable rooms - spotlessly neat, sleek design, minimalist decor. Each apartment looked strikingly similar – every single one could have been a Better Homes and Garden’s feature. A reflection of the people themselves. The Dutch – civilized, well-educated, urban and cultured – to my observations just seemed lonely and aloof. 

As a stranger in a strange society I longed to be embraced by an outgoing calamity of a family (in tradition of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) adopted by them, fed and fawned over. I would have loved for someone to meddle in my life, take interest in me when I was standing baffled again by daily affairs in a foreign country. 

From a distance the Dutch system is worthy of admiration; Dutch tolerance has created a drug policy that makes logical and statistical sense in a way the US’s “war on drugs” never has.  Perhaps Americans are just naively optimistic – foolishly hoping to abolish prostitution and drug use – where the Dutch have resigned to the reality of it and created, through realistic policy and tolerance, a country with greater social equality and less crime.  But the spirit of tolerance has spurned the spirit of generosity, concern and friendliness that I find in abundance at home. Dutch independence is a lonely one. 

On our last day in Utrecht, my roommate and I pulled together our dwindling euros and decided to partake in one last Dutch cultural phenomenon. To the great disappointment of my friends at home, I had spent four months in the Netherlands without stepping foot inside of one of the infamous coffee shops. We pulled open the door to a den-like shop I had walked past nearly every day; the walls laden with Bob Marley posters and Rastafarian colors. I giggled shamefully during the transaction, struck by the novelty and how ridiculously touristy I felt. For a half and hour my roommate and I wandered downtown Utrecht, clutching our small plastic bag and looking for an out of the way spot; we settled on the shadowy steps of the city’s cathedral tower. We sat reminiscing about our trip and trying our best to get a buzz off the cheapest joint the store offered. Three middle-aged women tourists with short frazzled hair and drab-colored clothes wandered past. They stopped in front of us, marveled at the magnitude of the cathedral, and snapped a photograph - insuring that we would be immortalized in their family photo albums. As they shuffled on talking amongst themselves, my roommate and I laughed, hoping that the novelty of us smoking in the street had warranted their photograph. But, for my part, several coughing fits later, our purchase had completely failed to produce the high that number 7 of “The Top 10 Things to do in Amsterdam” promised me. My brush with Dutch tolerance left me three euros short and nursing a burning throat (from smoking what tasted like straw but was probably just unfiltered tobacco).  It was, like so much of the Netherlands, far short of its state-side reputation. 

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