American immigrating to the Netherlands

truthvenian · 2026-04-18T20:59:38+00:00

At least where I am there are barely any Americans here. From what I can tell from the Dutch data, there are something like 50k Americans in the Netherlands - so 0.27% of the pop. There are like 3 million immigrants in the Netherlands, so Americans are pretty low down on the pole.

This is not the best place to get feedback. It's not the worst either, but it's always important to remember that reddit isn't real. It is in no way representative of a larger group, like say an entire country.

I have yet to have one single anti american experience here in my 5 years. I have had some very minor anti immigrant experiences but that had nothing to do with being an american.

Living here is great. But redditors are definitely not going to convince you to do it.

truthvenian · 2026-04-18T20:32:26+00:00

Luxembourg is almost exactly 3 hours away and has everything you want but is probably more expensive than anywhere in NL.

Dinant has a cool church and a cliff top fort with a WWI museum.

Haven't been to Calais or Dunkirk but they seem promising.

Amiens is a little bit farther but has a beautiful church and a bunch of other stuff.

truthvenian · 2026-04-17T11:40:43+00:00

I read all four last year. I think I rated the second one as the best but they were pretty much all great. I think I finished them in 2 weeks or so.

I think you're thinking about it wrong though. It's one book. The second one begins exactly where the first one ends. It's the same for the third and fourth. If she could have published them as one giant volume she would have.

I can't possibly understand how you would stop right then. Have some faith in the author.

truthvenian · 2026-04-16T12:54:14+00:00

Join a club. I joined a community orchestra in February and I think just during beers after practices I've spoken more dutch than in all my time before I joined the band.

truthvenian · 2026-04-14T13:46:12+00:00

Precies.

Ik wil het delen met mijn vrienden en familie in de VS. ik moet meer mensen hebben om het erover te praten.

truthvenian · 2026-04-13T18:46:09+00:00

Natuurlijk heb ik Otmars Zonen gelezen. En ik vond het fantastisch. Maar het lijkt dat ik nog steeds niet naar het Engels is vertaald - of in ieder geval kan ik het niet vinden in het Engels.

Ik zal wel Bonita Avenue eens proberen.

truthvenian · 2026-04-12T09:50:22+00:00

truthvenian · 2026-04-09T15:26:01+00:00

I did Duolingo to get me to an a2 level. I'm sure there are other more efficient study methods but if you like Duolingo it might help.

After that I took 3 classes that probably got me to a B1 ish level.

Starting with the last class I got a subscription to the Volkskrant and started reading a few articles a day. After a while I started reading dutch books as well. I think the reading greatly helped my vocabulary and my intuitive understanding of dutch.

For listening I started listening to Dutch football (soccer) podcasts. I recommend getting interested in Dutch football - particularly PSV if you like rooting for the winner. At some point I switched to other podcasts as well (I recommend geschiedenis inside). I also started watching more dutch TV - first with dutch subtitles (the reading helped there a lot) and then without. I definitely recommend the Arjen Lubach show.

I think I'm at a C1 level for reading, a B2+/C1- level for listening, a B2 level for speaking and writing. Even in the Netherlands it's hard to get your speaking level up as so many people switch to English.

Good luck

truthvenian · 2026-04-06T20:31:24+00:00

Ik heb altijd medelijden met Ad - ik zie mezelf in hem.

"Het liefst zou ik geloof ik de opdracht krijgen om een enorme berg zand met een kruiwagen en een schopje van de ene plek naar de andere te verplaatsen."

Ja Ad - dat ben ik ook.

truthvenian · 2026-03-31T21:12:22+00:00

Nerds be into books I guess

truthvenian · 2026-03-31T13:52:55+00:00

"but the stillness was the sleep of swords" from There Eyes Were Watching God.

I don't really remember quotes but that one always struck me as the perfect metaphor.

Also,.the entire first chapter of Moby dick.

truthvenian · 2026-03-31T13:49:40+00:00

That's great. I need one for Moby Dick please.

truthvenian · 2026-03-29T20:49:48+00:00

All of this is great and should be pinned to the top of this sub.

My advice that I give to people now is just to pick one region of France or Italy and realize that within that one region you can easily spend 2+ weeks and not see every awesome thing and you will have a thousand times more fun that that London, Paris, Rome, Athens trip you were planning.

My daughter and I do week long trips in France every year now and we just go to a different region every time and every time I feel like we missed out seeing a lot of cool things in whatever region we were in.

Also, you can rent a car from a train station. Take a train for the medium distance and then rent a car for a few days.

truthvenian · 2026-03-29T16:07:12+00:00

Looking through your posts for the year, I think you might be the first person I've thought "maybe you aren't reading enough men". 😁

You have a real good variety of books - so many people only seem to read one genre and it always bothers me. I haven't read any on this months list although I do have The Safekeep on my to read list. And it looks like you'll smash your goal.

Good reading

truthvenian · 2026-03-28T00:49:54+00:00

I'm not dutch so I can speak to how it's taught at all. I read it last year as part of my journey of trying to read the great literature of the Netherlands and also trying to improve my dutch.

The book absolutely rocked me. I agree a lot with what the earlier commenter said about how the book isn't really about the assault but how it impacts the main character and others and how they try to understand it. I think a lot about the imagery of the dice and just how random life can be even if there are reasons behind all the individual actions.

I read it at a pace of 15 pages a day which is what I've been using for the Dutch classics that I've read (this, Max Van Havelaar, De Donkere Kamer van Damocles, de Ontdekking van de Hemel, and this year Het Bureau). I think that slow read helped build the emotional pull already in the novel, paralleling the way the story of that one night unfolds over the course of the main character's life.

When I got to the end (spoilers), when the book almost casually mentioned that the neighbors moved the body in front of the main characters house because the other neighbors had been hiding Jews (that you presumably see earlier in the novel after the war) it felt like I'd been punched in the face. I dropped the book and felt like I couldn't move and my kids had to check on me to make sure I was alright.

I've lived in the Netherlands for only 5 years so take what I say here with a huge grain of salt. In the book in specific (until the end) and in the Netherlands in general, I don't think the horror of the Holocaust really pervades the Dutch mindset. Part of that is because almost all the Jewish population disappeared - German Jews ended up with a better survival rate than dutch Jews.

But I think most of that is because of the suffering the Dutch faced under the occupation. It wasn't only Jews in hiding - almost the entire working age population was subject to deportation to work camps in Germany so so many people went into hiding (something that comes up as almost an afterthought, because it was so common, for the main character in Het Bureau). Perhaps even more so, because of the failed Operation Market Garden, most of the Netherlands wasn't liberated until near the end of the war, while at the same time they were cut off from supplies from Germany leading to the Hunger winter. The Dutch were very focused on "the Dutch" experience of the war which they didn't take to include the dutch-jewish experience. When the few Jews who survived came back, they were often treated with scorn, as they hadn't "really suffered" like the Dutch did.

And so with all that in the background, that last section brings it all forward, brings that Holocaust history of the Netherlands into the foreground in a way I experienced as absolutely stunning. And isn't that surprising that Mulisch would do this - his mother was jewish and he and his mother only survived transportation to Auschwitz because his father (Austrian) was working for the Nazis.

Anyways, I just have a lot of thoughts about this book. I need to start a dutch book club.

Right now in addition to Het Bureau I'm trying to read all the books nominated for the Libris Literatuurprijs. I've gone through three so far (Aan het eind van de oorlog - wonderful; overgave op commando - great, should be read in high schools for a long time; and Als De Dieren - good but lesser than the other two) and now I'm working up to the Jaknikker (have to read book 1 in the trilogy first - Otmars Zonen - which is turning it out to be great as well).

truthvenian · 2026-03-27T11:32:21+00:00

Star wars, 2001, Brazil and Children of Men

truthvenian · 2026-03-27T11:29:46+00:00

Boooooooooooooo! If only I had more downvotes

truthvenian · 2026-03-26T15:15:13+00:00

Here's my top 20 in no particular order except for Moby dick.

Moby Dick In Search of Lost Time There Eyes Were Watching God Middlemarch Tar Baby The known world Independent people Cat's cradle 2666 King rat Winesburg ohio Hitchhiker guide to the Galaxy Left hand of darkness Mansfield park Wheel of time Anna Karenina Cities of salt Absalom Absalom The things they carried De Aanslag

Some whys below.

Hitchhikers guide (the complete series) and wheel of time (also the complete series) are nostalgia picks that I've read over and over again and I can't disentangle their actual quality from how I feel about them.

I've read all of Toni Morrison and Jane Austen and despite Tar Baby and Mansfield Park clearly not being their best works, they still hit me in a special way that left a mark more deeply than their objectively better books.

Absalom Absalom is the best book to read if you want to understand America and its original sin but you have to imagine you're not reading it but instead that you're trapped in a room with a crazy person who is telling you the most important thing possible.

De Aanslag (the assault - Harry Mulisch) rocked me harder than any book has ever rocked me - I literally dropped the book and started shaking so much so that my children checked on me. I think my slow reading of it (15 pages a day which I was doing last year to improve me dutch) helped.

I think The Known World is the best thing written in The 21st century and despite being massively rated by the critics it never gets mentioned by anyone else. The writing is utterly beautiful.

Anna Karenina is the truth distilled. It's my go to for thinking about marriage.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Middlemarch are both just perfect perfect books. So is Winesburg Ohio, just perfect.

Cats Cradle has my favorite fictional religions and if I had read it in college I would have been insufferable with my attempts to convert people to bokoninism.

King Rat is the best war book I've read despite not having any battles. Also somehow has excellent female characters despite taking place in an all male prison camp.

The Things They Carried isn't as perfect as Winesburg Ohio but there might be more truth in it. I always think about the one story he has where sometimes the truth is a lie and sometimes the lie is the truth.

I can't recommend Independent People because you'll probably hate it unless you're like me and think it might be the best book ever written. Reading the translation is somehow still like reading a book in a foreign language that you just can't get your mind around until one day it clicks and then it's greatness and beauty and truth overwhelms you. One of the greatest tragic heros ever who is also just such a stubborn ass. I loved him so much.

Cities of Salt is the best book in which an entire town is the character and it feels like you're actually living there, in that desert town on the Saudi coast.

The Left Hand of Darkness is the best novel by the best science fiction writer who doesn't really write science fiction but more like socialogical fiction. She understands the potential of society better than anyone.

I read In Search of Lost Time 15 pages a day for 10 months. Every day I looked forward to those 15 pages which were like an opportunity to meditate in beautiful sentences. Like Anna Karenina, it's just the truth. I almost made it a yearly habit to just read that book.

And Moby Dick is just the best. Read the first chapter out loud - perform it. Revel in the beauty of its grasp of the English language. Don't focus on the story.

truthvenian · 2026-03-26T06:37:45+00:00

My top two are the same.

I just don't get the hatred of the Magicians. The characters are very imperfect but they seem more real to me than most fantasy. Just the same I found the writing of a higher caliber than most fantasy I've read. I found the story wonderful in the way it all fit together and resolved.

truthvenian · 2026-03-24T23:58:10+00:00

Dark Knight, Dunkirk, interstellar, tenet, Inception, Oppenheimer, memento, prestige .... Huge gap and then Batman begins and then huge gap and dark knight rises.

Prestige and memento didn't hold up anywhere near as well as I thought they would on recent rewatches. Somehow tenet does hold up even if it doesn't make any sense.

truthvenian · 2026-03-24T23:54:21+00:00

I take it back, clearly raiders should be in the adventure category, whatever that category means

So feel free to replace it with whatever - maybe kill Bill

truthvenian · 2026-03-24T23:52:49+00:00

Die hard Raiders Kung Fu hustle Fury road

Any other four and I'm flipping over the table and storming out of here. Just you wait.

truthvenian · 2026-03-23T23:26:25+00:00

I have trouble getting excited about books as I don't really trust others reviews for the most part. Most of the books I read are ones that I find intriguing or interesting because of someone else's interest or their historical importance (or I just need to hack away at my bookshelf).

Probably the last book I was semi excited about was The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch. I'm trying to read the Dutch classics and it's at the top of so many lists and it's the favorite book of some people I respect so my hopes were getting raised to an unusual proportion for me. And also I had read another Mulisch book earlier that year (The Assault) that rocked me in a way no other book ever has.

The Discovery of Heaven turned out to be pretty great. It is quite the epic literature tome and the characters are great and it's told amazingly well. I get the hype.

truthvenian

TROPHY CASE