Reply to Which countries or even cities in Europe would you describe as “welcoming”?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am black and have travelled all over the world. Black people have very different experiences in terms of being welcomed.

Finland was definitely not welcoming. Turkey was wonderful.[/quote]

Unfortunately this.  I did a summer studying in the Netherlands.  I did fine in the Netherlands, my classmate/friend who was Asian American got a lot of weird comments.[/quote]

I only spent a few days in Amsterdam but I found the people there weird with no boundaries. Like, once I was sitting on a bench outside a grocery store eating some baby carrots I just bought, waiting for my friend to come out and a guy walked up and asked me for a carrot. Not a homeless person, just a guy in his 20s. It wasn't a conversation starter, he wasn't hitting on me, he said thanks for the carrot and kept walking. There were a few other mundane incidents like that, where I thought wow, these people have no boundaries. So I can believe they would say any racist thing that came to mind, or ask to touch your hair, or other offensive things. [/quote]

Dutch are very direct. [/quote]

I’d have said no. I’m very direct too. [/quote]

Amsterdam is the worst part of the Netherlands to visit  - they are overrun with tourists and the locals resent them. Other parts of Netherlands are much more friendly and civil. [/quote]

While I met many welcoming people in the Netherlands, I remember three funny exceptions from my in college with my now husband and two college friends. None were in Amsterdam.

(1) in Leiden when I struggled to order a grilled cheese (trying the Dutch words) and the waitress asked if I wanted “old cheese” or “young cheese”. She was struggling to explain / ask, I ordered the old cheese, and she continued to try to communicate something. After I confirmed that I wanted the old cheese, the man at the next table said - in perfect English - “the old cheese is quite piquant.”

(2) In Gouda a young child (7 or 8 years old) approached us, saying something in Dutch, and trying to sell us a Dutch-language newspaper. We declined. The child then realized we spoke English and asked in English if we wanted to buy the newspaper, and we declined again and started to walk away. The child pedaled after us in a bicycle yelling increasingly loudly (in English) “hey man, I f*ck you in a**!” over and over. I don’t think the child knew what it meant (who knows) but we were getting dirty looks as we ran from this child on a bicycle. We eventually jumped a wall to get away.

(3) In Maastricht we asked for a beer at a pub. When the person taking our order acted as if he didn’t understand we switched to French and German. I had decent French and my husband decent German, but our college friends were fluent because of the countries they’d lived in during childhood. The one with German had actually lived in the Netherlands for a year when he was 6, so was good at picking up Dutch words (again). The person still acted as if he didn’t understand. It was only when my friend switched to ordering in Dutch that he served us.

By contrast, in Amsterdam a woman chased after me to give me better directions when she realized “4th left” hadn’t included a cobblestone alley (I remember being surprised she knew the word for cobblestone) and a crowd at the train station at about 2 am tried very hard to “correct” us “help” us when we were trying to get tickets to the quiet neighborhood outside Leiden where we were staying as they were quite certain nobody wanted to go there in the middle of the night. (We were staying with people my friend’s family had stayed in touch with.)

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Your 2 made me smile. I’d have paid to see that exchange. [/quote]

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