There’s a very specific moment when you realise you no longer live in your home country. For some, it’s the first time they pay €4 for coffee. For others, it’s when they receive a letter they don’t understand about a system they didn’t know existed. For me, it was halfway up a Dutch staircase, clinging to what felt less like architecture and more like a polite suggestion of a ladder, wondering if this was how it all ends.
Dutch homes don’t ease you in gently. They introduce themselves the way the Dutch often do: directly, efficiently, and without unnecessary cushioning. The stairs are steep because space is scarce and history is stubborn. You learn quickly that going up requires focus, and going down requires intention, and preferably dry socks. Somewhere along the way, it stops feeling dramatic and starts feeling normal, which might be the most unsettling part.
Then there’s the toilet situation. No one really prepares you for it, perhaps out of kindness. It’s not just the size, although ‘compact’ would be generous. It’s the design choice that suggests a level of… attentiveness… that many cultures have quietly moved away from. The first encounter is unforgettable. The second is educational. By the third, you’ve accepted that this is now part of your life, like rain that arrives sideways or sending small amounts of money to friends with alarming precision. Also, as an Italian, it was quite different for me to adapt to not necessarily having the toilet in the bathroom but apart, and no bidet whatsoever! Italians abroad, I feel you!
And then, just when you think you’ve understood privacy, you look up at street level and realise everyone’s living room is on display. Curtains, if they exist at all, are open. Lights are on. People are eating dinner, watching television, existing, fully visible to anyone passing by. At first, it feels like you’ve accidentally walked into a series of uninvited home visits. You avert your eyes, unsure of the rules. But no one else seems concerned. There’s an unspoken agreement here: seeing is not the same as looking, and openness is not an invitation.
It would be easy to dismiss these things as quirks, the kind you collect and recount to friends back home. But they start to mean something after a while. The steep stairs, the efficient use of space, the lack of curtains; they all point to a certain clarity in how life is organised. Things are as they are, and they tend to work. Comfort exists, but it’s not always where you expect it. Privacy exists too, just not necessarily behind fabric.
Expat life is often framed around the big adjustments: language, work, bureaucracy, identity. But it’s these smaller, daily encounters that quietly reshape you. You become someone who can navigate narrow staircases with a grocery bag in one hand and dignity in the other. Someone who no longer questions the design of a toilet. Someone who eventually stops noticing whether the curtains are open or closed, perhaps because you’ve left yours open too. And believe me, you will after a couple of years, especially in summer when days are long and it is nice to get natural light until late.
There’s a kind of humility in that shift. You arrive with habits that feel universal and discover they are anything but. You adapt, not all at once, but in small, almost invisible increments. And one day, without quite realising when it happened, you walk past a row of brightly lit windows, glance inside without thinking twice, and continue on your way as if you’ve always known how to live here.
Which, in some ways, you now do.
Written by Rossella Davì