This topic is placed here because I also want to encourage serious discussion about Dutch issues. I don't think that opening topics for Dutch issues warrants separate topics though. Thats why I placed this topic in this forum. This is a serious topic, even when people will ask funny things, or discuss funny things.

My father being in the U.S. Army, I had the opportunity to spend several formative years in the Netherlands (3 -5 years old) and I have wonderful memories there. We lived in a rented house across from a horse pasture down the road from an actual Cobbler's shop. All my friends were dutch and I couldn't understand why so many people there thought America was so cool (this being the late '70s). I really hated coming back to the U.S. I couldn't understand why Sinterklaas wouldn't visit us anymore and why all the TV was only in English instead of Dutch or Belgian.

As a whole, you guys have to have the coolest people in the world, in my personal opinion.

I couldn't imagine how that must have felt. You still understand it a bit? Did you ever go back?

I remember a few words, though I can't spell any of them (5 year olds are illiterate ). I don't have a functional use of either Dutch or Belgian, which I had become rudimentarily fluent in. There was just no call to use it once I got back. I returned to Europe and lived in Germany for a few years but never got back to the Netherlands, sadly. Now I'm too poor to go, airfare being what it is.

Wonderful! My Great, Great, Great grandfather was Barteld <namewithheld> from Groningen who was a young bakers apprentice. Surviving letters from the time say he was a terrible baker and his children (the authors of said letters) preferred their mothers cooking to his though this was years later. Anyhow, he wanted more economic opportunity than was available to a bakers apprentice from Groningen so he hopped on a ship and came to the US around 1880. A few years later he sailed back to fetch his wife, then she hated here so he traveled back to drop her off but she decided maybe the USA wasn't so bad so he went back and got her one more time! Then she died and he remarried... we (jokingly) suspect murder..

Anyway, he found the economic freedom he was looking for and started his own bar in Lafayette, Indiana and built a few apartment buildings. His kids started a grocery store out in Missouri handling people heading west and one of his grandkids moved to Wisconsin to be a preacher at a new church in a small town that was about to have a railroad come through. The railroad was cancelled and the raised hill where tracks were to be laid still stretch through outside town though it's overgrown now and the town never got above 500 people. The next generation son ran a grocery store and the next after that sold gloves. This one fixes computers!

I often wonder what Groningen specifically or the country in general was like back then and how my life would be different had he never moved out here. Visiting his hometown and stopping at a few local bakeries is on my list of things to do before I die.

I live in a town that is almost all Dutch immigrants and a few of the elderly actually came over themselves and English is their second language.

I like your drug laws. Worked in Beerse when I was with J&J.

My grandpa is from the netherlands. Good to see the country gettin some love.

I'll be going there for the weekend.

Just how advanced is the bicycle infrastructure? Does anyone use cars for a journey less than 30mins on the bike or so?

I'm not OP but another Dutchman (getting his degree in law) and I can tell you that (under EU influence) our drug laws will be quite a bit more strict. For starters, we won't sell any weed to people that don't have the Dutch nationality, and there are plans to make coffeeshops exclusive clubs that you can only enter when you're a member.