The Dutch

I've mentioned here already my soft spot for the Dutch, which even made me try to learn the language - an attempt I had to temporarily give up on due to lack of time. After having read Ben Coates's Why the Dutch Are Different I scrapped the idea altogether. I still think the language sounds beautiful, still admire the Dutch for their tolerant attitudes towards gays and drugs, like their Golden Age landscapes and so on. But I can't really love a country that flat, a country that overcrowded, and a nation that indifferent to the concepts of privacy and solitude. Of course, the book must exaggerate a bit, otherwise the Netherlands would have no autistic adults - they would all commit suicide well before adulthood - but still ....