Rotterdam

I’m not going to lie I didn’t have particularly high hopes for Rotterdam after every Dutch person on campus told me how ugly it was. It wasn’t. In fact it was really quite beautiful. It probably helps that I really like modern architecture and they’ve got plenty of that. It’s really innovative and it feels like a very artsy city. It is very different to everywhere else I’ve been in the Netherlands though, especially because they were far less cyclists (or at least it felt like it).

I was lucky to have a local as a guide around Rotterdam as it’s really big and it feels it, maybe that’s partially the tall buildings though. Plus they also showed me all the good places to go. It was mainly just wandering around rather than going anywhere specific which is what I like when I’m going to new cities, we got smoked sausages (and I temporarily gave up on my vegetarianism), bought a really nice lemony tea from Simon & Levelt which is apparently great for making iced tea with (sadly we don’t have a freezer to make ice in) and went to a pub/bar that sold hundreds of beers – I got a honey beer.

We walked down by the river which was really nice and then went on a boat trip around the harbour, which, other than being really cold, was interesting. Weird to think that in the age of planes we still do so much of our business by boat. 

Apparently this is Santa holding a Christmas tree…

Note to self: Try not to cycle too quickly when you’ve actually put effort into how you look because you will sweat off all your makeup when you stop and that’s definitely not fetch.