Europe Cruise 2023

We woke up to a stunning view from our balcony this morning…the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Another wet and gray day but oh so much warmer than Oslo. We walked over the bridge to our meeting point for our bike tour. We ended up with a private tour, with two guides nonetheless…we were guinea pigs for his maiden ride. A couple of wrong turns and a very wet ride, but lots and lots of information. We started at the Rotterdam Centraal, their main train station that was completed in 2014. On our way there, we had passed a sculpture alongside the canal that caught my eye. We didn’t get a chance to get a picture, in fact our pictures today are minimal cuz of the rain, so I’ve used a few off the net, but I had asked about it and figured I would get more info off the internet later, but I can’t find anything about it. However, the guide had said it was meant to depict a lonely boy, representing the increase in the past several years in teen suicide, and that the sculpture would be moved all around The Netherlands to bring attention to mental health amongst the youth. We went on to City Hall and then the St. Lawrence church that was almost completely destroyed by a bomb in May, 1940. I took a screenshot of what the area looked like after the bombing. Next stop - Markthal - an indoor marketplace place full of food venues and wares on the first couple of floors and then flats on the rest. The building was completed in 2014 and has a glass facade on both sides made up of smaller glass windows. The smaller windows are mostly squared and around 1485mm wide. All of these are hung around a structure of steel cables, 34 metres high and 42 metres wide, which makes it the largest glass-window cable structure in Europe. The windows are made to be able to flex to a maximum of 70mm in a storm. On the inside, the artwork shows enlarged fruits, vegetables, seeds, fish, flowers and insects and was made using digital 3D-techniques. The enormous file of 1,47TB needed special servers, which are also used by Pixar Studios for making their animated movies. The digital 3D-animation was separated in 4000 pieces and then printed on perforated aluminum panels. Pretty amazing. We did a quick drive-by of the infamous cube houses…would’ve liked to have seen the inside cuz can’t envision it. They were designed by architect Piet Blom and based on the concept of "living as an urban roof": high density housing with sufficient space on the ground level, with its main purpose being to optimise the space. Our next stop was at what they’ve nicknamed the “teacup” building, built in 2021 as the new storage home for the collection of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. It is a very cool 40-metre-tall mirrored ‘flowerpot’ and was crowd-funded…we were told you could purchase a mirrored panel for €1000. We finished our tour and headed back to Markthal for a delicious kebab and then on our way back to the ship, we walked through Lijnbaan and Beurstraverse, nicknamed “Koopgoot”, or “shopping trench”. Both pedestrian areas housed a variety of food, cafes, stores (some favorites from my time in France: Primark, Flying Tiger, Bershka, Pull & Bear, Kiko…). Then a quick stop at a pastry truck for an apple beignet 😋. We got soaked today but it was a great day of exploring - Rotterdam was pretty sweet. It is becoming very apparent that we sacrificed pleasant weather for less crowds. The rest of the gang took ship excursions and did not get back to the ship til late, so we had a quiet dinner and then skipped the nighttime entertainment to sit on our balcony (first time so far) to watch the evening skyline, as we sailed out of the harbor.Read more