Rotterdam

Hostelboats are cool… oh wait no they are not. So… my brilliant plan was well umm… not so bright. Once we had arrived in Rotterdam and told our taxi where we were wanting to go, he looked at us a little odd… I only understood once we got there. So our hostelboat “The Clipper” was tied off at the very of edge of Scheepmaker’s Island… I guess not that surprisingly it looked nothing like the picture on the website. In front of us was a boat that looked like it had been to Hell and had only managed to come back because no one there wanted it.

So after we had rung the bell (yes it actually had a doorbell) and waited in the rain for 30 minutes, we said screw it and started looking for our new lodging. Well surprise surprise, Scheepmaker’s Island had no other hotels/motels/hostels/beds for rent/cardboard boxes/etc. so we had to hike it back to the area near the train station. We actually ended up the first hotel we saw, because I had been informed that if I did not find somewhere soon, I would be sleeping with the Scheepmakers if you know what I mean. Just trust me that this establishment was a… significant upgrade from our usual lodgings… enough said.

So on the rest of arrival day we walked around a design and book shop area and stopped at Café Dudok for some awesome café and the best apple pie ever… seriously…ever… Afterwards we walked to one of the most famous squares in Rotterdam, Schouwburgplein (Theatre Square), which was really quite excellent. The parking garage was contained underneath the squares main boardwalk, adjacent to this main area were a series of red cranes that had lights at the ends of their booms. These cranes are a reference to the fact that Rotterdam is the world’s largest port, they are also completely operable for the public, by ways of a control box set near the base of each one. There is also a nice theater in the middle of the square. Later that night we came back to this square and had some awesome Greek food.

Our first full day we went to Café Dudok again for some stellar breakfast, and walked to the big market square, where we rummaged through vendor stalls and booths. In the end we were a little disappointed, but it is still early in the year, and in all honestly, once you have been to Porto Portese… no other open air market really has a chance. On the other end of the Market square was Blaak station, which was a really nice rail stop. Next to Blaak were the (in)famous KubeHouses. These houses are actually in the shape of a cube that has been balanced upon on of it corners and then stuck on a pillar. They were the result of competition from the 70’s, and are actually pretty interesting once one understands that they create a covered walkway over an extremely busy throughfare. They also tend to cluster and create courtyards, which are then ringed with retail; but on the aesthetic level they are well... atrocious.

After the KubeHouses we walked along a big shopping street until we came to what, as we found out later, the natives call, the “Shopping Gutter”. The Shopping Gutter’s real name is, Beurs Traverse, but either way it is really simple, and still really cool. Basically it is just an underpass that has been filled with shops that continue back and connect up into the larger department stores that reside at street level. This allows the busy street that would cut through the middle of it, to continue unimpeded, and protects the area from the noise of the street and the major winds that shoot through Rotterdam. Further along this street transforms into a series of pedestrian streets that have low-lying arcaded shops, with higher residential buildings springing up behind them.

This took us back to the area of the crane square, and so we started to walk to the Museum Park area and went to the NAi, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, where I, much to everyone’s surprise, managed not to by a single book… and seriously you have no idea how hard that was… although I did manage to write down the titles and authors of at least a dozen or so books that I simply will have to purchase eventually. At this point we grabbed some awesome donar kebab and went back to the shopping streets where it was less windy and cold. Eventually we ended up back at our hotel for dinner; there was an incredible hibachi grill downstairs and so we of course had to try it before we left, and hey I can proudly say that I have had a very nice Asian lady tie a very pretty, and very bright, bib on me… don’t worry everyone else in the restaurant had one as well.

The second full day we covered a good chunk of ground. We started by walking to Rotterdam’s version of Chinatown, and then back to Museum Park where we ducked into the Kunsthall, which is a great museum with an awesome café, just in time to miss the hail… yeah it was some odd weather there for a bit. After the hail quit we walked to the Erasmus bridge and the Luxor theater. From there we meandered until we ended up at Blakk station again and went back to the cool shopping areas. We really had a great time in Rotterdam, it is a lot of fun and as odd as it sounds, architects seem to be the only tourists that actually come here, most other people just go to Amsterdam and then make there way onto Germany or France.

Late at night on our second day I remembered that I had talked to another architect, Rutger Spoelstra , who was from the city of Delft, on the internet about woonerfs (a Dutch planning idea about “living streets,” also called shared streets). So I dropped Rutger a line and as luck would have he responded and said he would have some to go walk and chat with us. So we decided to spend our third day traveling to Delft and checking it out.

Boy was that a great plan, we really had fun after the rain and bitter cold had subsided. Rutger was not free until 4pm, but we got there early so we could get lost and wander ourselves. Unfortunately, we did understand the true extent of how much of the town would be shut down on a cold non-tourist season Monday morning. For those of you who do not know, Delft is for its blue chinaware, which is appropriated named, Delftware. The city center of Delft is really very nice. It is largely surrounded by a series of canals, and has several large open spaces. The largest of which is the central square that contains the New Church (circa 14th century???), several nice shops, and a bunch of closed restaurants… damn Mondays… Another nice area nearby, which was considerably newer, was a shopping courtyard with a new library and theater. After walking the city center we wandered around and went to the university. At this point it began to rain and be really quite cold, so we went back to buy an umbrella for Jeannie and a scarf for my dumb self.

That afternoon we met Rutger, who as turns out is a really awesome guy. We had a good time as we all went walking, with Rutger and myself talking shop, and Jeannie taking a bunch of pictures and her usual slandering of me. Thanks to Rutger we saw a ton of stuff we would have missed. It eventually began to hail and so we ducked into a pub for some beers and then Rutger took us to a nice Italian place for pizza and pasta. Afterwards we went back for our 15-minute ride back to Rotterdam, which was made to seem so much longer by our new crazy American “friend” who we acquired at the train station in Delft.

Well now we are leaving the Netherlands for the City of Lights, and I really want to thank Rutger again for his help and for just hanging out with us. Paris is supposed to be rainy the first couple of days that we are going to be there, and we are supposed to visit the Chauvet family over the weekend, so this should be an exciting leg of the trip.