The Nether Regions Part II
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2010
1
76
79
Trip End
May 03, 2011
Where I stayed
Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands
Friday, April 22, 2011
The next day we headed back in to Amsterdam, mostly just to wander round the city a bit. We spent much of the afternoon sat at a cafe (NOT a coffeeshop I would like to point out) drinking cocktails, before visiting a random museum and having a wander round the red light district. We had booked to go on a Pancake Boat, which offered all you can eat pancakes for an hour whilst floating around Amsterdam harbour, but thanks to a bit of confusion regarding the timings, we missed the sailing, which was a bit disappointing.
The next day we headed off on the train to Leiden, to head out and visit the Keukenhof, which is a huge flower garden only open between March and May every year. Being Easter Sunday the place was absolutely chocker but it was a fantastic place to walk around. The variety and vibrant colours of the flowers was simply incredible and I found myself saying things about the flowers which raised some interesting questions about my masculinity.
Amongst the flowers was a working windmill (working in the sense that it was still turning, although the millstone had long since been removed) which you could climb to get a spectacular view of the bulbfields in the surrounding area. All in we spent 4 hours there (I never thought I'd spend that long consecutively looking at flowers) before heading back to Rotterdam in the evening, where we had a lovely Indonesian Sate meal.
The Monday was spent idly wandering around Rotterdam, with no real agenda. We paid a visit to the Kijk Kube museum house, which is part of a row of disorienting cube shaped houses that are suspended above a main road, although this was a touch disappointing. Besides that the weather was so lovely we mostly spent the afternoon sitting on bar terraces around the harbour area. At about 6 we both had to head off in our respective directions so we said goodbye and I returned to Hilversum.
Comments
Was it a real windmill? I know that most of the windmills in the Netherlands are actually windpumps, for keeping their very low-lying land drained sufficiently (hence most of them never had millstones to start with!).