This blog is going to be a series of my impressions of the country and the people of the Netherlands, often called Holland. These impressions will then be formulated into a series of chapters and hopefully later into a boo

Through the nine years of living and working in the lowlands of the Rhine basin I have seen and done things that few foreigners who live here ever do. I have completely immersed myself in he Dutch culture and history to a level which I have not often seen. My wife, who is Dutch, describes me as "more Dutch than the Dutch." I hope my special perspective can give some insight into both the Dutch psyche and the misconceptions the world has about the Dutch and vice versa.

I have always been a people watcher. Often the wallflower at a party. Enjoying the spectacle which lay before me. I have always attributed this personality trait as having been greatly influenced by my second mom...the TV. (look for my poem 'My TV is dead'). This propensity towards voyeurism had some part in my choosing to study Cultural Anthropology for my first Bachelor's. It involved watching people, ascertaining things about their interactions and analyzing these into helpful descriptions and theories about the culture or clash thereof.

It is one of my theories of life that when people tell a tale of some happening in their life they create a script. Maybe not the first time. But certainly by the second time of the telling the teller has edited it to flow better. Has chosen to embellish it or shorten it for the audience or for the circumstances or as a reaction to your audience's reaction to your previous telling. You tell a story about a birth differently at work than to your sibling, for instance. Or in a short subway ride than in your living room.

During the repetitions of this tale the narrative thread becomes clearer. The teller builds blocks of the tale which can be easily added or removed from the text to suit the context of the audience (time, place, make-up) until the story, which began as a explanation of a real-life occurrence is transformed into a play of sorts. A script which you act out when told.

I have known this for a long time. It is not a new idea, but it is the basis of the chapters of this book. Stories that are based on real happenings which have been crafted into playlettes.

This process was never more clear to me than when I was teaching Technical Drawing to budding engineers at the local technical college. I would give the same lesson up to twelve times in a week to different groups of students. I developed a script which I freely edited, kept jovial and cordial but serious. Whenever a student would attend the same lesson twice I would feel a bit ingenuous, as if they were seeing behind the curtains of my stage and noticing that my lesson was not spontaneous but a carefully crafted play. The students laughed where I have planned that they should laugh, etc. Once you see the bag of tricks the whole thing feels kind of fake. Yet I assure you that this process is natural and the crafting of a good story is not a clever form of lying or deceit, but a necessary part of how humans communicate their information to many people over time. The tales I will tell here are true and the impressions I take away from it are honest, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent (grin).

That is this the process which, over the years have yielded the grist for this story-mill. I hope it will be worth reading for you and offer food for thought. In the end the opinions are my opinions and not fact, but I am actually kind of good at this watching stuff thing and maybe, just maybe, through my watching, thinking and telling, I have brushed upon the truth.

Christopher D. West

Amsterdam, 9 May 2010