One of the first things I noticed being in Europe is that everyone dresses nicely EVERYDAY! Some Americans may see this as an annoying chore to keep up with, as a lot of Americans, especially college students, seem to think that wearing sweatpants is an acceptable thing to leave the house in. I, however, have been very opposed to this idea of always dressing "comfortably" while out in public. My thought is that I am in a way "selling" myself to others by my appearance alone. No one is going to believe me to be a makeup artist or film maker if I present myself as someone that can not even put on a pair of decent pants in the morning, putting an ounce of effort into the way I choose to present myself to the world. The point is, I welcomed this pride in one's appearance as a breath of fresh air; I was finally surrounded by my peers.
I think it took me about 3 months to notice that a common Dutch practice is to wear the exact same outfit for two or three days in a row. I'm not talking a basic t-shirt and jeans that a person could easily have multiples of lying around, but more statement pieces such as a shirt with a very distinct bold print and brightly colored jeans. The first time I noticed this I thought "Oh man... someone didn't make it home last night." Then I started paying more attention and noticed that almost every person in my class was guilty of this at one point or another. This completely astounded me! I even talked to one of the other Americans about it to see if they had noticed it as well, and they had. We came up with a theory that because they buy such nice, quality pieces of clothing, that they must only be able to afford a limited number of them and therefore want to get as much use out of them as they can while limiting the amount of times they are washed.
Well, we were definitely right on one front. The clothing items were most definitely expensive! Being a poor college student myself, I typically shop the clearance racks at the bigger stores and buy a lot of my things from second hand shops. In Arnhem, I only found one vintage shop that hardly had any clothing in it at all, much less anything that I would want to wear, and the prices were still high considering it was used clothing. Thankfully, my roommate discovered a store called Primark, which was incredibly inexpensive and had almost everything you could want. I mean, skater dresses for 7 euros? Yes, please!
The shopping experience itself was a whole different matter. Dutch people have no sense of space whatsoever! And they definitely won't utter an "excuse me" or "sorry I completely knocked you over while barreling past you in order to get to the sales rack" to save their lives. Honestly, I couldn't count the amount of times that I would be looking at some clothes on a rack and another woman would come up, practically elbow me out of the way, and start looking at the same rack and size that I'm looking at. It was aggressive shopping at its finest. A Saturday in the city center of Arnhem is almost like Black Friday in the states, only without the trampling, stabbing and death.
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