In 2012-2013 China was the leading international nationality at Tilburg University, representing 2.5% of its total student population. In fact, in 2012 TU even started an exclusive office in Beijing just to attract more Chinese international students. Coming from the far-eastern side of the world, the jump from their local culture to the Dutch way of life is a great leap for this segment of the international student community. Before landing here, most of them considered Dutch culture to be pretty much like in any other Western European country. The subtlety of the local variations in traditions and tastes was lost across the vast distance from here to their homeland. This of course meant that a lot of them came here without very many expectations, just with the general impression that accompanies a well-developed nation: great amenities, greenery and the good life. In some aspects their perceptions of the Dutch became even more positive after they came here. They found the Dutch people to be more kind, helpful and easy-going than they had imagined. What they found surprising however, was that the notion of the good life in the Netherlands was quite different in relation to the Chinese. Yupeng Luo, 30-year-old Communication and Information Science premaster student, said, “Personally, I don’t think that the Dutch care so much about the food taste, clothes, or enjoying life… because I don’t know what they do after work or in the weekend. I found not so many people in the cinema here. But in China from Monday to Sunday, it’s crowded in the cinema. And here they aren’t so many restaurants, people prefer to cook at home. I also found that there are only five hotels in Tilburg. Tilburg is one of the six top cities in the Netherlands, but it only has five hotels. It’s unreasonable I think!”
Another big cultural difference for the Chinese students was going Dutch at outings, which means that everyone dishes out their fair share for the bill. “Here, when people have dinner, they only pay for themselves. Normally, in the region where I come from, it will be like this time I pay for all the people, and next time we make a switch on it. That would mean that we are really good friends, we are close with each other. Here, these things make me feel that I should maintain a distance with people,” mentioned Yu Gu, 27-year-old PhD student from the Communication and Information Sciences department.
The easy-going nature of the Dutch can sometimes be seen as laziness when it comes to study attitudes, especially when compared to the hard-working Chinese. However, Jian Zhang, 29-year-old Research Master student of Law (criminal justice), also nicknamed the Phantom of the M building where he spends most of his time haunting the study room, stated that this impression was misleading. He explained that Dutch students were seen as lazy, because they spend less time working in comparison to Chinese, “but
actually they are very highly efficient. When they do a job, they can do it well, and they make many detailed schedules, and they take one step at a time to achieve that goal. I think it’s quite good, because they know how to balance life and work.”
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"Tilburg is one of the six top cities in the Netherlands, but it only has five hotels. It’s unreasonable I think!”
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The next biggest international student community at Tilburg is constituted by our neighbours, the Germans. Forming 0.94% of the student population, they are a much smaller group than the Chinese. All our three German student interviewees said that because of the small distance between these two lands, there is not much of a cultural difference. These Germans came to the Netherlands expecting it to be more liberal and easy-going than their country, but found that wasn’t necessarily the case. Surprisingly though, the Dutch stereotype of being cheeze-guzzlers didn’t come from the Easterners, but from those closer to home. 22-year-old Bachelor student of Psychology, Sibel Gaensebluemchen, mentioned, “In Germany we have an expression for Dutch people. Well call them ‘Käseköpfe’ (cheese heads) because we always think of Dutch people eating cheese all the time.” And the average Dutch student in German eyes, “wears a shirt and a suit. Tries to look really fancy and has those aerodynamic haircuts with like two brands of gel in the hair. And cycles, obviously. Maybe a bit chavvy. And the girls are friendly, but sometimes when you are friendly to them they look at you like you’re ‘wooow’!” joked Felix Pahl, 20-year-old Bachelor student of Psychology.
As similar as they might be however, the interaction between the German and Dutch students was still seen by our interviewees as rather limited. “I have more interaction with Internationals than with the Dutch,’ stated Alexandra Werner, 25-year-old Premaster student in International Management. Even those Germans who take classes in Dutch report low interaction with Dutchies outside of regular university hours. Felix said, ‘On campus, my program is in Dutch, obviously I have lots of Dutch students in my course. But to be honest, I know only like 5 out of 500 or something… I hardly meet any Dutch people. They go to the class, and they go home.”
As for the stereotype about Germans being way too punctual, there’s no disagreeing with that. Most of them would prefer reaching 5 minutes earlier for their meeting. So you can pretty much forget about being fashionably late with this lot.
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