Interested But Not Inquisitive

I'm quite confident I can judge people without being prejudiced with a person's heritage, or religion. Therefore, I never start a conversation in that way and use other topics. Any person is welcome to surrender this information though.

If people are inquiring about race or religion just to fuel their own prejudices, that's lazy, offensive and defeats the purpose of conversation. Only your own direct interactions and intentions should be relevant for forming an opinion about each other. Anything indirect is of secondary importance.

A Sorry Food Culture

Put simply Holland doesn't have a food culture. Sure people eat, abundantly even. But when people's idea of a decent lunch is a cold piece of bread and a cut of meat and a slice of cheese, then you don't have a food culture. Not a rich one at least. People don't go out for lunch. People hardly go out for dinner.

Sure, Holland has its signature dishes, like boerenkool met worst, or erwtensoep. And there are plenty of restaurants and cafe's where you can eat. But all too often it's a French restaurant, or an Italian, or a Chinese... or McDonald's. All the real Dutch stuff is made at home. Not much more needed, but it doesn't fuel the appetite either.

And if you do go out to dinner in the Netherlands, it will cost you. Actually many other countries' upscale establishments are more expensive than anything the Low Countries can offer (try Tokyo), but you're not getting anything extraordinary for your Euro. Comparatively you can eat a better dinner for less money if you are not in the Netherlands.

Not that the Dutch need a food culture obviously. I mean, they're tall enough.

Asian Characters

Language barriers do exist for travelers, unless you're blessed with a knack for picking up new languages. The Asian characters are especially hard to fathom for Western natives. Most of those languages merely have an alphabet and then just rearrange their order to form words, sentences and so on. It's the words that have meaning, rather than the characters themselves.

Chinese definitely works differently, in that characters themselves have meaning. The sequence of characters describes context, meaning and intent. If you're a native speaker/reader, you have gained years of experience understanding that background. If you're a Westerner, you don't have that experience, so you wonder what the heck the characters for person, competition and wind are supposed to say.

Korean and Japanese are supposed to be a little less difficult to pick up. Korean actually consists of an alphabet, but then composes single characters from the individual alphabet components. Those single characters form sounds, which in sequence form words. Japanese doesn't form characters from alphabet components, but it does have two different alphabet systems, which it uses interchangeably. Also Japanese doesn't get away with completely losing Chinese characters, so a Westerner will very often see characters not covered in the alphabet.

Asian character systems are very efficient with regards to footprint. You can imply a lot using only a few characters. It also seems like some people have to say huge amounts of text, but don't write it down. It pays to have the common history, so that you know why people say so much with so little text.

All this makes it unrealistic to just head off to Tokyo, Beijing, Taiwan or Seoul without any language training, and just expect to do well with a small English-to-something else dictionary. You need to learn some simple gestures and the basics, otherwise you're going to remain lost in translation.

Or you could, you know, just go to Belgium instead.