You had to choose between a small set of approved groups you could belong to. It was especially bad in my small village in western Germany: you could be either a fashion victim (all with the same hair, clothing style, one year they ALL dyed their hair red), a computer nerd, a sporty person, a hip-hop or a techno fan. If you didn’t belong to any of the approved groups, you were an outsider and bullied.

Obviously I’m writing this because my best friend and I were among the outcast. We bought our stuff at thrift shops and didn’t care much for fashion, neither what was ‘in style’ nor the geek/techno/hip-hop fashion. One year I cut my hair really short and got so much shit for it, because apparently you could only do that if you 100% subscribed to a matching Goth aesthetic. (Still have short hair, so take that stupid mean girls!)

It was probably partially a small-town-thing, but if you look at the media from the 90s you’ll rarely see characters that don’t neatly fit a certain type.

I live close to the border so we go to the Netherlands about every other month. I have tried learning some common dutch tourist phrases like ordering food or asking for the toilets. Unfortunately, so far most shops or waiters have just insisted on using English or German and I’ve been told numerous times something along the lines of “Why would you try to learn Dutch? We can all speak English.”

The front desk lady at one of the hotels we stayed at in Noord-Holland even told me “Oh, don’t learn Dutch, that’s such a waste of time.” I don’t know, I love learning at least a few sentences of the local language when I go somewhere on vacation. But I’ve never met so much resistance to it as in the Netherlands.