This is a small country, the most densely populated in Europe, and so it is perhaps inevitable that the different cultures will cross-pollinate. If it isn't already, soon it will be Carel Murzius's country too. The Reigersbos neighborhood of Southeast Amsterdam, like many other neighborhoods in Dutch cities, already is full of new sights, sounds, flavors and rhythms. At a weekly open-air market in the neighborhood shopping district, a Dutch tradition, one stall is occupied by a woman selling dried herbs used in traditional Surinamese remedies. The buyers include not only immigrants, but also native-born Dutch.
Food is only one of the ways in which the immigrants have begun to change the fabric of Dutch life.
Music videos with production values worthy of MTV feature stylish black singers crooning and rapping in Dutch. Others see more wide-ranging changes, cultural changes. Nonetheless, even if precise measurement is difficult, many see changes that they trace at least in part to immigration. It used to be that if you saw a Dutch man walking down the street, he had on black pants and a white shirt. But now they're changing their way of dressing, their way of cooking, their way of approaching other people.