Now for the long-awaited second half of my Rotterdam adventure...
Saturday morning I was awake by 7:30, which is actually on the late side for me, but on this day I was especially glad to be such an early riser, as I had far too much to see and not enough time to do it all. I got as ready as I could without accessing the majority of my luggage, which was safely locked in a crate beneath our bed and guarded by a slumbering Nick who had the combination. Finally I shook him awake impatiently (in my defense, his alarm had already gone off once) and obtained access to my stuff, and by 8:10 we were tripping downstairs to partake in the (complimentary) breakfast. There was no sign of Shiloh, so I presume she had already headed off to Brussels for the day. Breakfast was mostly cold, and consisted of bread with various fixings, and several options for hot and cold drinks. There was one particular topping, however, which I was particularly looking forward to.
My mother's college roommate's husband (how's that for complicated) is Dutch and as our families are still quite close, we go down to a camp in Sweden (, Maine) for a weekend every summer to hang out with them when they come up from Pennsylvania for vacation. The two foods that we ALWAYS have at camp with them, which therefore I strongly associate with the Netherlands, is this particular kind of cheese which comes in great big rolls and we shave ourselves (which I always thought was super-fun as a kid; gimme a break, I'm an engineer), and sprinkles. Not just normal sprinkles like what you get at an ice-cream store (which, as everyone knows, are also called Jimmies), but super-flavored sprinkles. There are chocolate (dark and milk), chocolate-vanilla, and various combinations of fruit flavors. And they go on bread. One of our favorite lunches when we go visit this family is whole-wheat bread with (peanut) butter and sprinkles, or cheese.
So when I opened the unmarked metal canister sitting amongst the spreads and saw the black and white sprinkles it contained, I felt like I was really in the Netherlands. Nostalgically (as I will still be in Germany when my parents make our traditional vacation this summer) I munched on toast with peanut butter and sprinkles, and even added a German flair by trying a slice with Nutella instead of peanut butter. Satiated at last (I think it took longer to tell about this breakfast than to eat it), Nick and I set off for our first destination of the day: the Rotterdam Market. In all of my travels I have only touched upon this delightful aspect of Europe, once in Berlin, and once in Hamburg (the one in Clausthal wasn't big enough to count for anything, and it was all old people selling their junk). I wish we had more flea markets in the States, because it's like a whole CITY of yard sales crammed into one big open square. Everything you ever could have wanted was at the market: cell phone cases, purses, clothes, lingerie, fabric, watches, books, music, furniture, antiques, tools, extension cords, bicycle repair supplies, carpet, flowers, produce, sweets, fast food, and probably most impressively, fresh fish. I mean, some of these fish were so fresh they weren't even DEAD yet. That made me jump a bit, when the crabs I was so curiously inspecting began waving their sluggish claws at my nose. Since Rotterdam is right on the coast, these fish must have been the night's or morning's catch, or at the most Friday's. It was amazing. It took Nick and I a solid hour just to walk through all of the stalls, but that was okay because our next destination didn't open until 10am anyway :)
After perusing everything, it occurred to me that anything I bought at the flea market was likely to be a better deal than in a store. I thus frantically began looking around for souvenirs, but didn't have much luck, especially since nothing had caught my eye on our first time around and I had little desire to shove my way through the ever-thickening throngs of shoppers a second time. I managed to find a trinket for Emily and a Tupperware container (yay I can make leftovers again!), and Nick bought an extension cord for his room back in Dortmund. Then we treated ourselves to a Stroopwaffel (for which we had free coupons, courtesy of the tourist office - it's like a thin cookie sandwich with caramel in the middle, really yummy and sweet) and a small container of raspberries (many of which turned out to be rotten - ew) and walked out of the market up to our next stop.
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| People actually LIVE in these crazy apartments! |
The Overblaak development, better known as the Cube Houses, is a series of apartments designed in the late seventies by a man named Piet Blom. What makes these apartments quite remarkable is that they literally look like yellow cubes turned up on one corner and balanced on a pole. One of these houses has been opened up as a museum, and it was here that Nick and I turned our steps. After climbing two flights of incredibly steep stairs to get up into the actual "cube" we were surprised by how normal everything seemed. Everything was close-set, but it didn't feel terribly cramped, and the only way you would have known that you were inside an upturned cube was that the windows were at funny angles. The first floor was the "lobby" and a kitchen, where the dirty dishes in the sink made me suspect that the man behind the desk might just be the occupant of the apartment after-hours. Then, up another set of narrow stairs came the main floor (at the widest part of the cube), which included a bedroom, bathroom, study, and another staircase, each in a different corner with no doorways in between (with the exception of the bathroom). The second staircase led up to a third floor in the top of the cube, which was one room with large windows in the top and on three sides. It was a very open and bright space because of all the windows, and looked like an enjoyable place to hang out. I don't think more than three people would be able to fit comfortably in the apartment (and that's only if it's a married couple with a small child or the kid doesn't mind having the upstairs as his bedroom, as that was really the only other place for a bed) but overall I was pleasantly surprised by the design. It would certainly be a unique living situation!!
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Beautiful on the outside, I'm sure the museum would
have been just as interesting! |
After the cube houses Nick and I headed back across the market to a giant medieval church we had spotted earlier which contained an early-history museum that looked quite promising. Unfortunately when we got to the front door it was still closed, although the museum was supposed to open at 11 and it was well past that by this point. Disappointed, we decided it wasn't worth trying to come back later to see if it was just opening late for some reason, and moved on to the next item on our list - lunch. At this point I was starting to get a bit worried about the dwindling supply of Euros in my wallet, so instead of an expensive cafe we rode back to the central train station and nabbed hamburgers, fries, and shakes from a fast food restaurant (Smullers, one I've never heard of or seen before, so I can still pretend it was Dutch food ;]). Conveniently enough, our next destination was only a couple of blocks from the train station.
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| "Night" falls in Miniworld. Every 24 minutes a new day dawns |
I wasn't into trains much as a child (after all, I'm a girl) but after seeing how awesomely intricate and entertaining grown-up model train sets can be when I visited Hamburg last year (this is the part where I would reference you to that blog post... except I never wrote it... oops) they made it back on my list of "things probably worth checking out in any given city" (along with Natural History museums, City History museums, and Zoos). There's a really famous model train set in Den Haag, which boasts a miniature version of all the important places in the Netherlands, but while I was wandering around Rotterdam Central station one of the buildings I repeatedly passed advertised "Miniworld... an entire world awaits you!" Yay another model train set! Since a discount was also conveniently included in our Rotterdam Welcome Card, we decided to give it a look. It didn't disappoint, although it wasn't quite as expansive or impressive as the one in Hamburg (for example, while I took 210 pictures of the one in Hamburg, I only took 84 pictures here...). There were made-up towns based on real-life places as well as replicas of actual attractions in the Netherlands (for instance, the Euromast we climbed the day before and the beautiful white bridge that was just a block from our hostel).
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| A transformer terrorizing Rotterdam? Oh no! |
But the really exciting part about model train sets isn't the amazingly intricate detail that is put into the replicas of real places, though that certainly is marvelous. What I like about them so much is examining all of the tiny people in the tiny situations that the curators think up. If you're going to make thousands or tens of thousands of tiny people to inhabit your miniature world, you have to have some fun with it and put in some jokes or you'll go crazy. Apparently, the creators of this particular world are quite sadistic, though there were also some tamer and more ridiculous scenes. I saw a bloody car accident where the front windshield of the matchbox car was smashed in and a woman figure lay on the ground in a pool of red and glass, a nude beach where a young couple was playing with their small child, all happily exposed, an archaeological dig site where they were just finishing uncovering a dinosaur skeleton, a gynecologist's office through the windows of a skyscraper (as well as offices containing nuns, a wedding party, horses, and sheep in the same building), another accident involving several vehicles which had stopped traffic on a bridge, a rock concert which contained a fair number of nuns in the audience as well as at least one cow, a building on fire, a woman lifting a horse above her head, Thomas the tank engine (in several locations) and multiple "Occupy"-esque scenes where a cow was either the reason or mascot of their protest - it was difficult to tell.
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The Euromast! Or, a mini version of it. In the background,
the cube houses and the medieval church we also visited! |
Of course, the most remarkable thing about a model train set is, indeed, the trains, and especially how they are all so well-timed and coordinated that none of them run into each other. It is truly a feat of mechanical and electrical engineering (YAY engineers!). This model train set also didn't just include trains - trucks and vans also rolled along the (presumably magnetized) streets, transporting tiny goods from town to town inside MiniWorld. All in all it took us a good two hours to go around and see every part of the exhibit, which was slightly more exciting to me than to Nick, by far not as big a museum-goer as myself. However, he patiently waited for me to get my fill of the tiny scenes and even helped me find some of the "easter eggs" (like the penguins floating on an iceburg in the middle of Rotterdam harbor, a unicorn, or a smurf flagging down a train). Finally I had seen everything there was to see, so we headed back towards our hostel into the museum district for some more traditional exhibits.
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| The rhino's about 6" tall, for scale... |
Of course, I headed straight to the Museum of Natural History (mostly because I didn't know the address of any of the other interesting-sounding museums). While Nick was originally going to wait outside for me, when the entrance fee turned out to be a mere 3 Euros and the museum little more than a dozen rooms in total, he followed me inside instead. While the collection might not have been impressive in size, it was very well-done, and Nick and I enjoyed trying to identify the rows of stuffed birds and mammals, tentacly things floating in jars of ether, or various skeletons and skins that glared down at us from shelves and walls. The museum also gets credit for quality over quantity - it had impressive specimens of tiger, orangutan, polar bear, giraffe, and Nile crocodile, and that was only in the front lobby! The mutated creatures were particularly fascinating, especially the two-headed calves. The skeleton of an Asian elephant from the Rotterdam zoo was there, although the room he stood in had a curious and not altogether pleasant smell. The pride and joy of the museum was a replica of the skull of the largest fossil predatory whale ever discovered, appropriately named Leviathan. It is supposed to be a huge creature closely related to today's sperm whale, and it could easily have fit a SmartCar in its huge maw. I'm glad nothing in the ocean grows that big anymore! (that we know of...)
After the Natural History museum I still had high hopes to visit another museum, although at this point I was left with fewer than 20 Euros and was seriously doubting my ability to pay for food for the rest of my trip... However, when I entered the smuggling museum, which according to my online information had free entry, I was dismayed to learn that whatever I had seen was out of date and the entry for students cost a whole 4 Euros. I wasn't THAT interested in smuggling, so I decided to call it a day. Now, however, Nick and I faced the problem of where to find food, as he wasn't exactly rolling in cash either. He had brought his ATM card with him, at least, but was reluctant to face the fees of withdrawing money at a foreign bank. I had seen a DeutscheBank earlier in the day (which has a special partnership with Bank of America to only charge the exchange rate when you use their ATMs) so I told him where I had seen it and laid down to rest my weary legs. Unfortunately Nick returned within the hour empty-handed -- apparently it was only a Financial Center and not an actual bank. Taking advantage of our unlimited public transport tickets, we decided to tour a bit of the city via tram and try, on the way, to find a restaurant which would take a Visa card so that we wouldn't have to pay cash for food.
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It wouldn't be a trip to Holland without
seeing at least one windmill... |
This turned out to be shockingly difficult. Cash is still the currency form of choice in most countries outside the US and Canada, and Visa isn't nearly as well-known in the EU as Mastercard, so time and time again we met with shaking heads and apologetic "no"s from restaurant and cafe owners. We finally gave up and trekked to a McDonalds in the center of the city (leave it to the Golden Arches to be a haven for Americans!) where at least the food was cheap, if not national. While we were eating our rather pathetic dinner, we witnessed a rather singular event. A boy and his father had just gotten their food and the boy was carrying the tray to the table. Suddenly a pigeon swooped into the restaurant, flying right over the head of the boy and causing him to duck and drop his soda. The boy's father sent him on to a table while he went back to the counter to ask for another drink. The pigeon, meanwhile, had landed on a table, from which he watched the boy choose a seat, strutted back and forth a couple of times rather proudly, and flew back out the door. I don't want to know what that boy did to that pigeon or his friends, but I'm pretty sure he just got paid back for it.
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| Is it a statue or is it a person...? |
One more amusing story from the evening: as we were searching for an adequately cheap and international place to eat, we passed a silver statue of a man on the sidewalk holding out his hands as if to ask for money. The shocking realism of the statue caused me to pause and take a closer look. In Munich last year I had encountered people who painted themselves silver or green and stood on a box in the city square all day, with a small container for money set out in front of them. I couldn't decide if this masterful sculpture was an impressive work of art or such a street performer... If it was a person and I showed too much interest, I knew that he would probably move suddenly to try and jump me, and I also knew that it would probably work. But my curiosity got the best of me and I couldn't resist reaching out to his outstretched hands. They were warm to my touch... but hard like metal. Still, I had to touch him a couple more times to make sure that I wasn't being fooled. Nick, meanwhile, had stepped back, convinced that the man would jerk to life any moment and waiting to laugh at my inevitable shriek. Nick had noticed that on one side of the man's chin the metal was slightly flesh-colored and concluded that his makeup had at that spot begun to wear off. Fortunately for my pride, I was right and it was only a masterfully-done statue, but it definitely made my heart race for a minute...
At this point it was past 9:00 and both Nick and I were worn-out from our adventure-filled day. Feeling a little lame, we headed back to the hostel and turned in for the night, even though it was a Saturday. When I mentioned this to Nick, he pointed out that there wasn't much "going out" one could do without money, which neither of us had, and it's not really my thing anyway. So we settled in to rest up for the morrow, because neither of our adventures were quite over yet...
