Ain't no old town here!

I told you they had big bunnies in the Netherlands
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After walking down to the hostel near the river in Rotterdam, I headed back up to the museum area which is on the edge of the main shopping area. Because Rotterdam has been almost entirely rebuilt since the war, there isn’t really any centre to the city and things are more spread out than in a lot of Dutch towns. This is good in that they have built lots of nice appropriate buildings for displaying art and the like so you aren’t being cramped into a building that wasn’t designed for thousands of people coming through it every day.

The swan bridge in Rotterdam
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It seems that there are two entrances to the Bojimans van Beuningen (I think that’s how you spell the name. It is hereafter just referred to as the museum) Museum and I was lucky enough to pick the right one. The one that is under the temporary exhibitions of modern art is busy and had queues while the one that is through the next entrance at the very end of the building is for the permanent collection and I just walked up to the desk and bought a ticket. You can access the entire museum from either entrance so just pick the one with the smaller queue.

The sculpture garden at the art museum. The cafe is in the glassed in section overlooking the garden
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They have a good system where you can come and go from the museum up until closing time on that day and instead of giving out paper tickets they have little tokens on a string that you can wear around your wrist and don’t have to keep getting in and out of your pocket. I didn’t get an audioguide because I couldn’t find anyone at the desk at that end of the museum and I wasn’t going to walk all the way through to find another one. All of the explanations are in Dutch and English anyway so I don’t think that they are as necessary in this gallery. And you can take photos without a flash in this museum which is fantastic. Most of the rooms had reasonable light for taking pictures though some of the print rooms were a little dark.

This modern skyscaper next to the train station was designed to disappear into the sky
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The permanent collection is set up chronologically and has furniture, statues, paintings, altar pieces, silver and ceramics. It’s split over two floors with the upper floor being mostly paintings and the lower floor being mostly the applied arts. It’s a quite impressive collection of both modern and older art in very good condition and they have quite a bit of Dali’s art in the modern area.

I had lunch in the café which is downstairs at the back of the museum and overlooks the sculpture garden. I was actually quite impressed because normally cafes in museums are pretty poor but this one was not only a nice setting but did really nice food. They had sandwiches, two hot soups and various cakes and slices as well as hot and cold drinks and all for about the same prices that you would pay elsewhere. In the summer you can also go and sit in the garden and eat.

Tulip vases are possibly the ugliest thing that the Dutch ever made
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I then moved on to the applied arts section on the lower floor which has some very nice pieces and some really ugly stuff in it as well. There are some interesting pieces of furniture in the modern section including the bath boat which caught my eye. They also had possibly the ugliest vase that I’ve ever seen.

I then moved on into the temporary exhibits section some of which is free to access. Downstairs they had a print room with changing exhibits of prints from their very large collection and computers where you can look at the items that they have in storage. I think you can then request to see specific prints during the week. They also have a slightly odd collection of pieces which mixes the old and new works from throughout the ages into the one room and somehow it has some deep meaning. I think that I missed it though. It’s worth coming around here just to see the cloakroom which is a work of art in itself.

The Rotterdam Walk of Fame contains such luminaries as Kamal and Miffy!
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Upstairs are the other temporary exhibitions which you have to have a ticket for. The views from the windows up here into the courtyard are great. It’s got patterned tiles and the weird stainless steel structure in the middle but does photograph really well if you can get it with kids running all over it.

The current temporary exhibitions are a little odd. Pippilotti is a video artist and you had to take your shoes off to go to the area. Luckily, it has really plush carpet for you to walk on. It’s in a series of areas that are separated by filmy curtains and there are weird videos and music playing in both. It’s all very strange and was full of Dutch people lying on the floor to watch the ones on the ceilings. It supposedly was something to do with travelling through the human body or something like that but perhaps it lost something in translation.

Modern buildings in Rotterdam
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The other exhibition is of drawings and sculptures by a man and is about a mystical unknown island that has just been discovered. It was also a little weird but at least more understandable.

I wandered past the museum of architecture which is meant to be very good and is in a great building over a little lake but it had turned into a nice afternoon so I decided to head to the parks instead. I walked down through the small park behind the museum and past the Kunsthalle and the Natural history Museum and then cross the road and headed into the Het Park which is easy to find as it has the Euromast on one edge of it. The flowers in the park are just starting to come into flower and it’s looking very pretty.

Modern sculpture in Rotterdam
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The Euromast has a section on it that goes up and down in about 20 minutes and you can pay to go up and look at the view. I looked at the mast from the bottom and decided that I didn’t need to pay to stand in a moving room with floor to ceiling glass but the view is meant to be good. It started to get a bit cold in the later afternoon so I had to move on from the park and start walking around a bit more again. I headed past the enormous MC Erasmus hospital (which takes up quite a few blocks) and on into the suburbs on the side of the city. It’s not very attractive and some of the streets look a little dodgy. It’s not somewhere that I would particularly like to walk around at night.

The courtyard of the art museum
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I had dinner at a fabulous restaurant called Look (which means garlic in Dutch) and staggered out a couple of hours later, full as a goog and stinking of garlic despite the handful of mints that I chewed on the way out. My breath was not good in the morning (even though I cleaned my teeth twice before going to bed) but it was so worth it and the best meal that I’ve had while I’ve been away this trip.

Monday I went to the tulips (see separate entry for Lisse) and arrived back in Rotterdam at 4.30 pm. I headed back in the direction of the hostel but by a slightly different route that took me through some of the more shopping and office areas of Rotterdam. It’s a very ordinary looking city up the top end. It really could be anywhere. Down the far end of the main street, there is the Rotterdam walk of fame which has hand and foot prints of famous people who have been to visit Rotterdam including Kamahl and Dick Bruna and a lot of eighties stars who I don’t quite remember but were obviously bigger in the Netherlands than in Australia. Music in the Netherlands is a bit of a blast from the past. Like seriously, when was the last time you heard that Paula Abdul classic Opposites Attract. I’ve heard it twice in two weeks.

The cubist apartments are quite weird to look at. Unfortunately, I arrived too late to make the tour of the inside.
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I then headed for the cube houses which are a fancy set of apartments that have been built over the road and are like cubes tipped on their sides. There is a show cube where you can see what the inside is like but it isn’t open on Mondays. The stayokay hostel is now in one of the cubes (not that they have updated on hostelworld to say so) but I heard that they are having some problems with the place. I then headed back to the hostel via the supermarket and had some dinner.

The Euromast has a little rotating observation deck that goes up and down over about 20 minutes.
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Tuesday, I headed to Kinderdijk (read separate entry for Kinderdijk) for most of the day and arrived back in Rotterdam in the middle of the afternoon. It was a glorious day so I headed down to the bridge and the other side of the river for a look. It’s only two strips to go from the station to the near side of the bridge but three to go just over it so I caught the tram to the bottom and then walked over. It’s the nearest that I’ve come to a hill in the whole of the Netherlands. The poor cyclists were having to get off and walk. It does have nice views from the top though the port of Rotterdam isn’t that attractive and there are some interesting modern buildings on the other side. I walked past the Photography Museum which is also meant to be really good but I was tired and decided to just sit in the sun at the end of the street for a little while instead. I started to fall asleep in the warmth so ended up heading back towards the hostel after about 40 minutes. After a quick lie down and some dinner, it was time to start packing up again to get ready to head to Antwerp in the morning.