Post by Matthias Albrecht

I'm half German, half Turkish. My father from Berlin, my mother from Istanbul. Two cultures that, on the surface, don't have much in common — and both of them live inside me. On holiday in Marmaris this week, looking out at a view my parents have known for decades, I've been thinking about how that shaped me. And about a third culture that quietly moved in along the way. From my father's side: punctuality as a form of respect. Preparation as a quiet discipline. The instinct to structure a problem before trying to solve it. From my mother's side: warmth as a default setting. Emotion as information, not noise. And — from every summer spent as a boy in Istanbul with her family — the deep cultural truth that no price is ever final. That negotiation isn't about winning, but about finding the relationship inside the transaction. I've been living in the Netherlands for thirty years now. The Dutch register is different again: flatter, more direct, less ceremonial. In Germany, I grew up addressing people with Sie. In the Netherlands, you're on first-name terms before the coffee arrives. It took some getting used to. And then, at some point, it stopped feeling foreign and started feeling like mine. Every time I land in Berlin, it feels like home. Every time I come back to Marmaris — to the house my parents have kept for four decades — it feels like home in a different key. And every time I land at Schiphol, that feels like home too. Three cultures. Three registers. The German when the thinking needs to hold up. The Turkish when the relationship needs to deepen. The Dutch when something simply needs to be said plainly. Treasury, banking, building a business — all of it benefits from all three. Structure. Warmth. Directness. The frame, the human inside it, and the courage to say what you actually mean. Another of summers here. Grateful for what this place has given me — and for the three cultures that, between them, made me. Marmaris, May 2026.