Rotterdam (and other things)
This week has been perhaps less fun than other weeks as we have an essay and impending photo project due on Friday. My group chose the topic “Strange Amsterdam,” which is tortuously broad and difficult. We ended up narrowing it down to strange tourism and explored some of the odder places that Amsterdam has to offer tourists. My group is really great, and I’m not just saying that because one of them found this blog.
But we did get to go on a field trip to Rotterdam on Monday, which is one of the largest cities in the Netherlands. It’s known for giving its architects a lot of creative freedom, resulting in some unusual looking buildings. It also has a quite fancy car/metro/bike/pedestrian bridge.
The strangest of the strange architecture is probably the cube houses, originally designed as public housing but now available for private ownership (or as a hostel to stay in).
They also have an indoor marketplace which I expected to be lame, but it was actually quite bustling and loaded with free samples.
And here’s the fancy bridge:
It should be noted that even though it always rains, it was NOT supposed to rain on this day. I was caught very unprepared in my cardigan and Birkenstocks. Also, another completely unrelated side note is that I somehow managed to rip my jeans AND leggings in the same day, so I am now pantsless. I do have more room in my backpack for taking home stroopwafels now, though!
Besides Rotterdam, I have squeezed in some mini-adventures in-between essay writing and photo-taking. I am excited to announce that I have almost eaten all of the food in Amsterdam on my “food to eat” list! This was a rather short list, because as aforementioned, the food here is not that great. Yesterday, my roommate, Sarah, and I crossed an important gross item off of the list: a kaassoufflé from FEBO.
Amsterdam specialized in fried food that you can access while under the influence, and the FEBO is a prime example. It’s essentially an automated fast food place where you just walk up, put in some coins, and open the window to your deep fried item of choice. The kaassoufflé is a deep fried “cheese souffle.” Here is Sarah showing you the process of getting a kaassoufflé:
Besides FEBOs, Amsterdam also has a shocking number of fake beach bars along canals. This one was especially cool and featured an adult-sized outdoor play equipment set, including a giant hammock:
I have also been hitting the museum circuit quite hard lately. Our program gave us a card that gets us into 31 museums for free, which is quite nice. Here’s me and Sarah outside of the Riks Museum, a giant Dutch art/history museum.
I also went to the Stedjik museum today, which has modern art. It has a pretty awesome Matisse exhibit right now, and even a room for performance art!
The museums are decent here, but every time I go to a museum in Europe I just think, “The Art Institute in Chicago maybe actually IS the best museum in the world.” And I can go there any time I want, in just four days! But one things for sure, Chicago does not have kaassoufflé.