Rotterdam

I was able to get a train to Rotterdam. It was supposed to leave at 12:27 PM, but was about 15 minutes late due to the backups caused by the computer crash affecting Amsterdam Centraal. The good news is that I was able to take a hi-speed train, a Fyra, without having to pay the supplement. Dagretour = €27.70. Travel time about 41 minutes, versus the 1:04 an intercity train would take. Making up for lost time this morning.

Speaking of this morning, here are a few pictures from my stroll around Amsterdam:


A picturesque canal scene in gorgeous weather. It will be about 68 degrees today, and cloudless.




Mobile advertisement at its finest, and it made me thirsty.


Here I am in front of a typical Amsterdam city block. Below, the old church turned cafe that I'm looking at.


The scenery on the train ride to Rotterdam was very pretty, with flat landscapes and several daffodil fields (no tulip fields, though).


Rotterdam is a "new" city in the sense that it was pretty much leveled by the Nazis in World War II. As such, there really isn't a quaint olde-timey town square. Instead, it is a planned city with more-or-less grid like street patterns. I arrived at the station to find it almost entirely under construction. There were barriers and work sites everywhere, making a confusing place even worse. Also, have I forgotten to mention that the Dutch like to play hide-and-seek with their tourist information centers? This one was located in a corner of a restaurant, with no sign on the doors to hint at its location. True story. It was about 1:45 PM at that point. To my chagrin, all of the museums close at 5:00 PM, so I had a difficult choice ahead. I could either get in one museum, or I could do more of a survey of the city.

It's the survey I chose, in the form of a boat tour of Rotterdam harbor, one of the biggest ports in Europe. Here I am in front of the tour boat. A 75 minute tour on a glorious day, all for €10.50.


So now I have to admit something silly. When at the tourist center the clerk offered me the brochure for the boat cruise and told me that the next departure would be the last for the day, at 3:30 PM. I immediately translated 3:30 to 14:30 in my head, as the Europeans use 24 hour time and my travel watch displays the local time in that way. It was about 13:45, so I had to hightail it in order to walk most of the width of the city and make it to the excursions dock. And perambulate rapidly I did, but I ended up arriving at the ticket booth at 14:35. I walked up to the clerk anyway and asked her, "Am I too late for the 3:30 tour?" She looked at me strangely and replied, "No...it leaves in 55 minutes; you can board at quarter to."

I had mistranslated the time -- it was only 2:35! Unfortunately there wasn't too much else to do close enough to the docks. I looked for some late lunch, but the cafes that were close-by were all closed between 2PM and 5 PM. I wandered around the harbor front instead and took these pix:








Here are pictures and descriptions from the boat tour:


Old sailboats at dock.


The tall structure is the Euromast, the tallest structure in the Netherlands. You can go to the top in a high speed elevator for a superlative view of the city and it's environs, but my delay from Amsterdam made it impossible for me to partake. In front of the Euromast is a huge houseboat in a Chinese pagoda theme..


Above: one of the many cargo terminals we passed. We saw an active port, with huge cranes manhandling the containers like pieces of straw (a corner of one of the cranes is in the foreground, extreme left, in blue. Below: a ginormous cargo vessel being offloaded.





This is the S.S. Rotterdam, once the flagship of the Holland-America cruise line. In its heyday it served movie stars and royalty alike. Today it's a floating museum and something I would have liked to tour.

I caught a train back to Amsterdam and arrived back to my hotel at about 8:00 PM. It's about 8:30 now, and I think I'll get a late dinner and retire. Today is my last one in Amsterdam. Tomorrow I have a 3-hour journey to Liège, Belgium, where I'll stay one night before arriving at my next home base, Brussels, on Saturday.

Location:Rotterdam,The Netherlands