[ June 2017 ] The last city we visited with the South Holland tour in the Netherlands was Rotterdam.
Here there is the largest port in Europe and the number of people working for the port is as many as 250,000.
The people working for the port in Amsterdam is 20,000, by the way.
Our guide, Erik told us that the city was destroyed nearly completely during the second world war and after that they keep building and rebuilding the city on and on.
He said “The people here work hard and die young”.
From my point of view, this city is not pretty at all, not like other places we visited.
In Gdansk in Poland, for example, the town was destroyed in the war as well, but they tried to rebuild the town as before at least on the surface, but here, they did not seem to have cared about the look of the town and built peculiar buildings arbitrarily.
One of the examples is the Cube House we went to see, which is a group of residential houses in the eccentric shape.
I had seen the photos of this, but did not know it was in Rotterdam.
The tilted yellow cubes are nestling against themselves.
Each cube is a residential house.
This was designed by the Dutch architect called Piet Blom and built in the early 1980s.
We wanted to see how it is inside and fortunately there was a sort of open house museum.
We paid €3 each to get in and see the inside.
It was a three storey house and the total floor space was fairly large, but because it is tilted, there were many unusable corners.
And because the walls and the windows are all slanting, I felt I was losing my sense of balance.
But the worst thing was the staircase.
It was narrow and so steep.
I think the designer excluded children and old people completely.
I have no idea how they put the furniture in.
I would say that this is an architecture which the designer practised his peculiar idea for the exhibition and not for people to live in and relax there.
I would not live here even if they give one free.
Next to the Cube House, there was another strange looking house which looked like a rocket with funny shaped windows.
We left that area and visited a tower called Euromast in Rotterdam.
It was built in 1960 and the height is 185 metres.
When we were approaching this tower, one American member of our tour raised her voice “Look, there are the window cleaners up there!”.
Surely there were some people hanging connected to some ropes.
But they were not window cleaners but the people participating in an activity coming down the hanging ropes from the top of the tower.
We did not do that, but just went up the tower to see the view of Rotterdam, but for me, I am sorry to say, but it was only confirmation that this city was not beautiful even looking at it from above.
Hearing the audio guidance in the tower, I could see that people here wanted to tell us how good this city became by their efforts, but we would probably not come here again unless we needed to.
That was the end of our South Holland ‘tasting’ tour.
I would like to travel around this country one day.
