We arrived by train in Rotterdam around 2pm after having
some problems buying tickets at the station. It turns out that in the
Nederlands, you cannot use a credit card to buy train tickets. Eily tried to
buy them with her debit card, but the machine would not take that either. I
suspect that this was because it was a Visa card and the machine assumed that
all Visa cards were credit cards.
It
didn’t matter – it simply meant that we went to the “hole in the wall” a little
more frequently than we had planned.
This was also my first experience with grumpy ticket sellers
at Dutch railway stations....I suppose I shouldn’t be too harsh because they
have to deal with difficult customers every day, but a smile and a little less
exasperation when asked a simple question would have been good. However, they
did print out simple itinerary that showed which stat ions to get off at which
platforms to go to in order to catch the connecting train. A word on the Dutch
railways - very efficient and quite easy to use. I’m not sure why Australian
rail networks are not modelled on the Dutch version.
The scenery was not what I was expecting – the first hour or
so consisted of rolling hills and forests and it took quite a while before we
saw anything resembling the flat land that I was expecting. I did see a number
of dairy farms where the cows are housed in sheds and allowed out on occasions like
we do with our chooks....
Our hotel was not that far from Rotterdam Central, but we
soon discovered that we were not located in a busy part of Rotterdam. There
were a few shops, but it seemed more suburban than city centre. Eateries were
infrequent and turned out to be bars with snacks rather than somewhere we could
sit down and eat. The great thing was that there was a couple of laundrettes
located on opposite sides of the street not that far from the hotel, so we took
the opportunity of doing our laundry in the first couple of hours of arriving
there.
Unlike London, the laundries were not situated next to a
pub. One however, was located right next to an establishment that declared itself
to be a Sex Shop. As we very quickly discovered, nothing is left to the
imagination here. The windows, open to public display so that children can see
everything, exhibited quite graphic examples of the wares available for
purchase from the shop.
We eventually found a cafe/bar that served substantial meals
and decided that this was the place to eat tonight – and we able to sample some
more Dutch food and plenty of it.....
The next day we found our way into the city centre after
following the directions of the waiter at the cafe we ate at last night. It
turned out our hotel was on the edge of the city centre – we had simply walked
in the opposite direction when we went exploring. We found the “cube” houses
after receiving directions from a woman we were talking to in a shop who just
happened to live in one. They were certainly different to anything we had seen
before.
After lunch we took the train to Amsterdam to briefly
explore that city. A journey of only an hour or so, it gave us another chance
to view the Dutch landscape – and this was flat landscape. The only things that
could be described as hills were the manmade embankments for roads, railway
lines and the dykes and so on.
We arrived and set off in search of Anna Frank’s house. The
queue was so large that we decided to give that a miss and simply took photos
instead. A wander around the streets where we discovered canals and boats that
served as homes, adorned with flower pots and washing hung on lines. We
stumbled on what we assumed to be the city square – it was very large and full
of people taking photos of each other with a quite majestic building in the
background.
As was the case in Maastricht and Rotterdam, there were also
the bicycles to contend with. These people are dangerous – if they are doing
work on the footpath (water or gas main
repairs) and you are forced to step into the bike lane to get around it (I haven’t
discovered how to fly yet) you are verbally abused by the cyclists for doing so
– and they don’t give way. Even worse is the fact that the bike lane is also
used by motorcyclists....
After a coffee and a wine in a cafe on the square, we
explored some more of Amsterdam on our way back to the station and came across
the red light district. As was the case in Rotterdam, the live sex shows have a
variety of advertisements that leave nothing to the imagination. It makes some
of the ads that cause outrage in Australia appear absolutely tame. ......
Amsterdam is obviously quite an old city – there were many
quite old buildings, some of which looked as if they were ready to fall over as
they appeared to be on some alarming angles. Rotterdam does not have the same
age at all – the buildings were all relatively modern, which I suspect means
that it was also bombed during the war.
Back to Rotterdam that evening as Eily is leaving us in the
morning to return to Australia.
