Racial Stereotypes.

Been wanting to blog about the different types of nationalities that I've seen and been around here, so here goes.

For obvious reasons, let's start off with the Dutch. Firstly, the Ducth are extremely tall, doesn't really work in my favour. The Dutch are also very very straightforward people; they don't like it, they'll tell you right in the face. They think you dress like crap, they'll tell you, you dress like crap. And the Dutch have a, erm, subtle (actually i prefer to use weird) sense of humour. You have to see the irony in their jokes, then it has a semblance of 'funni-ness'. Only a bit.


Not that they crack jokes too often though. In fact, the same can be said of the Europeans in general. From my observation (thus might contain some inaccuracies), the Europeans don't really have a sense of humour. not a good one at least. And they also do not laugh too much (again, doesn't work in my favour). In class whenver the lecturers crack a joke, I will have to control myself such that I don't go into my normal outburst of laughter, because no one else will be laughing. I just don't get them!

I've heard some people telling me before I came that Some Europeans (Dutch, Italians in particular) a bit racist. Erm, personally, thankfully, I haven't encountered too much of that. There has been cases though, whereby some of my block mates, the way they talk to me, indicates clearly they believe in White Man's superiority. I don't layan these people too much. In particular, there's this Belgian gal and another Italian gal(not the one that I told some of you about)are a bit stuck-up, there's this (negative) air about them when they talk to non-caucasians. But that's only the minority. Generally, it's fine.

I have to say, I hate to say this, and I never thougt I actually would, among all the Westerners, the Americans seem the nicest. They are really friendly, bubbly and thank-God, they do have a sense of humour! They are really sociable people; the guy next door to mine is American, he makes it a point to mention my name in every sentence of his because he probably feels bad for initially forgetting my name! Haha. But he's a really nice guy, and so are most of the other Americans.

I actually know a Slovakian guy! Haha. He was talking to me the other day and the impression he has of SIngapore is that it is a police-state: No chewing gum, nobody's allowed to have long hair etc! Well, he's not too far-off. Haha. But the long hair part was funny. Wonder where all these funny ideas originate from. We were having an intense debate too about the idea of 'freedom' and 'democracy'; since he was questioning the freedom that Singaporeans have. I won't bore you with the details of our discussion, basically my flow of argument was along the lines of one of my earlier entries,"By whose definition."

As for the Muslims here (the locals i mean), they are mostly of Turkish and Moroccan descent. Again, from what I've observed, they are quite practising Muslims. The Muslim community here isn't too integrated with the native Dutch though. The good thing about that; they can maintain their customs and traditions, and their Islam isn't diluted by westernisation forces. The bad thing; it makes them prone to discrimination. As the "bro" in my earlier entry told me,"Amsterdam isn't a good place to be a Muslim." It's a very delicte balance to achieve: integrating into a society without losing your values etc; usually there's a trade-off. In this sense, I believe we in Singapore have, erm, achieved successfully this balance??? Or at least we are almost there lah! Haha.

Yup. That's all thus far. I need not mention about the Chinamen here coz you see them more often than i do. Haha. So that's it for now.