By Joris Reer
Emigrate – you can learn how to do that! And if you don’t want to end up in another world completely, there is always an intermediate step. Emigrate to one of the Caribbean islands of the Dutch Kingdom! That’s what I did. Left the Netherlands in October 2015. Destination: Curacao. A beautiful island in the sun, where the going language is Papiamento, but also Dutch. The ties to the “motherland” are still there.
In many ways. For example, shopping. You see that every day, everywhere. In the supermarket you can buy your regular Dutch brands. This routinely causes hilarious moments in the store. Dutch tourists who time and again react with surprise when they see the peanut butter and chocolate sprinkles on the shelves here. Not to mention the taters!
It is also wonderful to see the difference between the tourists from the Netherlands and those from the United States. Which is an ever-growing market for our island. The yankees don’t have much vacation time. So when they go on vacation, nothing is too crazy. Spend it all!
The Dutch couple, on the other hand, who are on vacation here behave just like at home: thrifty. Back to that supermarket: after the frequent yelps of delight over encountering Dutch products, indignation often follows. “No way, that carton of milk just costs 5 euros here!” Well… And you get a box of fresh Zeeland mussels here for the equivalent of 15 euros. That’s what life on a sunny island is also about. Everything needs to be imported. And what’s fresh is flown in by KLM. You do the math.
On the other hand, the sun is free. And fortunately it shows itself frequently. All in all, life in the Dutch Caribbean is not so bad.
*Joris Reer (Veldhoven, 1991) also crossed the ocean, but emigrated to Curacao. He hosts the afternoon show Reer in het verkeer at Paradise FM 103.1 in Willemstad, and runs into both Dutch and American tourists every day.
