“But the country has been taken over by Muslims, right?” a random man in the Warsaw airport asked me, after finding out I was from the Netherlands. “Not that I’ve noticed,” I snarked, before deliberately putting on my headphones.

If I’m being honest, I suspect someone who poses questions like that to the stranger next to them in the airport queue likely has problematic views about most nationalities. But I do think the Netherlands draws out more weirdos than other countries.

Every country has its stereotypes of course. The French wear berets. All Canadians are polite. Egyptians ride camels to work. The Germans are efficient.

The Dutch, however, seem to attract an outsized share. The Dutch ice skate to work. Everyone is smoking weed all the time. We kill all the old people. Wooden shoes are common footwear. Everyone is tolerant. Huge areas of the country are no-go zones. Visiting sex workers is a regular occurance. All the real estate is tulip fields. It’s a country of giants. The food is bad.

Ok, some of those are true.

Perhaps it is the weirdness of Dutch history. First to have gay marriage. Legalized (sorta) cannabis and sex work. Lots of famous painters. “The Hague” as a place you send bad people to. A lot of the country is below sea level.

Many things about the Netherlands are unique or the country was the first to have it, generating headlines and urban legends.

Anyone who lives here has stories about being asked very odd questions about the place. “Can you pay with dollars?,” one of my Dutch News colleagues said she’d been asked. Or asked for directions to “Led Zeppelin plein” (Leidseplein).

Tourists can be dumb everywhere. The reputation of Amsterdam as a city constantly covered in the haze of weed smoke slightly obscuring the windows filled with naked women available for purchase certainly attracts a breed of tourist that is on the worse end of the scale.

My Polish airport pal, however, looked like a typical business guy, not the organiser of a stag party. I’ve been asked by similar looking people about the country’s no-go zones. The previous US ambassador to the Netherlands claimed politicians were being burned in neighborhoods taken over by Muslim youth.

There are certainly places that Dutch people don’t go. The Damrak for instance. Keukenhof. Pretty much anywhere in the centre of Amsterdam in the summer. Shops that sell a €15 stroopwafel.

The Dutch also get a lot of weird questions about their euthanasia policies. I once saw a Fox News broadcast about how the elderly in the Netherlands wear bracelets saying “Do not euthanise me.”

Lots of countries have decriminalised or legalised assisted suicide and euthanasia now, but the Dutch somehow seem to still be associated with the practice. The Swiss probably face similar queries but there are even fewer of them than of the Dutch so maybe it’s just too hard to find a Swiss person to ask.

Such questions have increased since I became a Dutch citizen and now travel on a Dutch passport. People outside of the Netherlands often see me as a real Dutch person and thus want me to defend these people and their bizarre practices.

The only problem with correcting them is that I would be forced to disclose my birth nationality. And the only people with more stereotypes than the Dutch are the Americans.