vitrage curtains

yesterday, while riding my bike, i got the idea for another bit to write. driving by houses, i thought why the heck do you have windows if you always have the vitrage curtains drawn? wouldn't it be easier to have a house without glass that you are going to cover anyway? cleaning windows is a big nuisance to get them clean without wiping signs, so you would not have to do that anymore. taking down vitrage curtains and bring them to the dryers costs time and money, so you could save. the whole building project would cost you loads less. they just have to lay bricks without a care and put in one hole for the door to be placed! why would you want to shut out your surroundings? don't you want to see your garden and don't you want sunlight to enter your home? ticino is sooooo different from holland. one day a patient of mine said she went to amsterdam and she was so suprised to see furniture stores everywhere. she did not understand she was looking into our homes. in holland we do not draw curtains, although in the last couple of years, people who live on very busy streets have started to put sticky fancy plastic on their windows to keep glares out. you can look in but then you would have to bend over or stand tiptoed and that would be a bit obvious. per se dutch people do not look into the houses of others, so why should we put up vitrage curtains? we might have curtains to be drawn in winter to keep out the cold and to make the house more cosy. and the foremost important thing about dutch having no vitrage curtains, is that we say "look into my house, we don't have anything to hide". here in my new homestead people have windows no one ever could look into because the house is surrounded by a garden with a very high hedge, so why hide? then we also have the electric blinds which will come down on the push of a button. every night, even in summer, at about 7 pm you will  hear the first ones go down, zzzzzzzzzzzzzz, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. my god, they are sitting in the dark, and might have to turn on a light! i can tell, i think we dutch are healthyminded;) all the rest has an edge;)