SPAIN >>> NL
When someone asks me why, being from Spain, I choose to live in the Netherlands, I often reply that here I find an almost magical combination of the best of two worlds: a very relaxed attitude mixed in with a down-to-earth pragmatism that makes the most complicated things suddenly seem ‘matter-of-fact.’

Living-room streets
The minute someone steps out in the street in Spain they are walking onto a stage, it is a public ground and so it is tacitly assumed that one should dress up in order to exhibit themselves, draw attention by having loud conversations and intentionally look at others. Here I like the fact that people make a habit of occupying the streets in a very shameless way, as if they belonged to them. It would seem a very southern European thing to do: drag your chairs out and chat away with a glass of wine at your front doorstep. But instead of setting up theater, when someone sits in the street in NL, it is more like pulling the intimacy of their living-room onto a piece of sidewalk: they dress down, sit back and speak softly, and oddly enough passers-by are expected to ignore the display – as if they weren’t invisibly standing in the way of everyone – and pretend to not get a glimpse of the exposed ‘gezelligheid.’

The predictability of small talk
Casual conversation in NL is dominated by an endless debate over the weather and its scarcities, such as chances of sunlight or dry afternoons. Neighbours and other acquaintances in Spain also discuss the weather, mostly for its negative excesses: draught, heat waves, flooding. In a city like Amsterdam the next level up – an exchange longer than 5 minutes – revolves inevitably around the question of place of origin, nationality, number of languages spoken (a matter of national pride), length of stay, etc, because hardly anyone is originally from here. After that, it is almost impossible to predict what the next topic will be. But in Spain, beyond the weather headlines, the next chapter of small talk that characterizes most social occasions is strangely predictable: every gathering will sooner or later be fueled by a heated debate over the quality and taste of this or that cheese, ham, roasted peppers, marinated olives, wine, and so on, turning every conversation into a parallel gastronomic experience and every Spaniard into an opinionated connoisseur of Dionysian dimensions, independent of social or economic status. The closest to this I have witnessed here would be a discussion over Belgian Trappistenbieren.

Sexy biking
Most women in Spain would never bike on the streets – even if it were a feasible transport alternative. Hip-swaying is regarded as a much more sensuous and a lot less forthcoming type of sexy street behavior, that is, anything but straight-forward.