Double Dutch

The weekend after my Brussels trip, my hosts Matt and Odette came for a visit to Rotterdam.  However, the weather was perfect, so I couldn't give them the full Rotterdam experience.  Interestingly, they gave me more of a Rotterdam experience than I had given myself this past month.

We decided to meet at Euromast, the key Rotterdam landmark, which happens to be on the west side of the city.  I had never been there before, nor had I ever ventured west of the central station.  Since I refuse to get a two-wheeled suicide machine, I mean a bike, that meant a one-hour walk.  The walk from my apartment to Euromast happens to be entirely on the water's edge, so I really got a whole new view of the city.

One thing I hadn't realized was how many bridges there are in Rotterdam.  I honestly don't know how many Rotterdam has, but it seems to be at least five according to the all-knowing Wikipedia gods.  Either way, I have yet to cross any of them.  And if I cross them twice, I'll be double crossing them.  (I'll be here all semester, folks.)  The entrance to one of the bridges did have this extremely crucial sign: 

  

After exactly one hour, I arrived at Euromast, but not before stumbling upon the Secret Garden.  As far as gardens go, this one was pretty green and had flowers and trees and other verdant-ness and animal life...but really, it was a very nice park.

      

Euromast itself is Rotterdam's Eiffel Tower: a large and in-charge observation tower with no other discernible purpose.  People have tried to give it a purpose by jumping off of it, with "abseiling" and "rope sliding."  These activities cost 50 euros, and I'm a neurotic Jew when it comes to situations filled with too much excitement, so I passed.  However, it was kind of fun to watch people gleefully hop off of a structure 100 meters (330 feet) in the air.

 

Eventually, I met up with Matt and Odette (I say eventually because we were standing on opposite sides of a bush for 15 minutes) and we grabbed some coffee (or in my case, hot chocolate) at a diner inside of Euromast.  They even had a bin with no-limit FREE mini stroopwafels!  They say 10,000 stroopwafels died that day...

We ultimately decided to skip out on going up the Euromast in favor of checking out Rotterdam's War and Resistance Museum.  The Dutch, generally known worldwide for their violent militarism and lack of neutrality, managed to put together a good showcase of the World War II experience in the Netherlands.  Unfortunately, a lot of it was in untranslated Dutch, so I have to forever assume that Rotterdam was actually a planned Nazi community for Hitler's most sinister bike-related mass murders, until I confirm otherwise.  Despite the language barrier, it was in fact an interesting and enjoyable tour through Dutch WWII history.  Some of my new favorite things have emerged from the trip there: tobacco-tin guns, baby carriage arsenals, welfare biscuits (typical poor people leeching off the government - why couldn't we have let the free market feed bombed-out Europe?!), and "Dat Holocaust" Anne Frank (too soon?).

                          Yep, this happened. 

After the museum, and the shock of seeing Anne Frank in "dat ass" meme form, we went towards the Museumpark which, as the name implies, is a large area with various museums.  We stumbled upon the World Food Festival, which lacked all three components.  It was essentially a couple of house-type structures showing off "unique" ways to make food (one way apparently being to crush up bugs into some weird powder form).  

On the way back towards my apartment, we encountered a bunch of cool public art.  In particular, I liked a Gundam-style mech statute and a stack of oil barrels: 

We ended up on my now-usual haunt, Hoogstraat, where I had to deal with my phone issues.  And by issues, I mean the internet on my phone was completely non-functional.  After jumping between the phone store and a T-Mobile store, I discovered that my month of prepaid phone had indeed run out, but I was also told that my account balance fell to three cents.  Thinking I had paid a set amount of money for a set amount of talk time and internet, I really didn't understand what a three cent balance on my account meant.  I still don't quite understand the screwed-up system of 'topping up' a prepaid SIM card, but it involves paying a certain amount of euros for another month of your plan arrangement while you also keep track of your overall account balance.  When I have a revelation about how this strange system functions, I will let you all know.  Point being, I switched from T-Mobile to Lebara, and my phone internet actually works for once.

Though I spent most of the rest of my weekend working on my moot court assignment for EU Internal Market Law, there is one more order of business: Dutch TV.  Specifically, the movie Turks Fruit/Turkish Delight (directed by Paul Verhoeven, who did the Starship Troopers movie).  Matt and I decided to check out some authentic Dutch TV.  As I had just read in my textbook about how picky the Dutch can be at times when it comes to appropriate TV content, I was not expecting anything out of the ordinary.  Curious, then, that a mainstream Dutch channel decided to carry the movie Turkish Delight completely unedited at dinner time.  I'll let the vagueness pique your interest enough to check out the details, but let's just euphemistically say that it had frequently-unclothed humans in their unnatural habitat and a scene where a guy picks up bloody stool with his bare hands out of a toilet.  In case that isn't enough for you to say "I'm moving to the Netherlands tomorrow," the movie was voted the greatest piece of Dutch cinema of the century, nominated for an Academy Award, seen by 27% of the Dutch population upon its release in 1973, and is the most successful Dutch movie ever.

Today's Dutch lesson: brug (bridge).  Like the city Bruges/Brugge.                    

    

To .be or not to .be

Life is like a box of chocolates.  Sometimes you get chemicals and vegetable fat masquerading as semi-edible chocolate product, and sometimes you get 100% cacao.  Overall, these past few weeks have been pretty cacao.

After a fairly inactive period post-London, I got the urge again to grab Europe by the balls, in a metaphorical way.  Aside from traveling, I channeled that energy into spending hours meticulously reading my EU law books.  Now that I'm getting a little more into the swing of things at Erasmus, I'm really enjoying the chance to immerse myself in all things EU.  Studying the EU makes me feel like I'm home, not necessarily because I want to live in Europe, but because it brings out some innate sense of happiness in me.

At the same time, I realized that my weekend was going to begin on Wednesday afternoon, so I started thinking of possible trips.  Long story short: my friend Matt from my Brussels study abroad trip invited me to hang out at his home in Leuven.

I spent the first half of my 4-day trip in Brussels.  It was a very strange feeling being back in Brussels over five years after my study abroad.  I couldn't help but think about how much has changed over the course of these five years.  Back then, I was like:

But now I'm like: 

After putting on my big boy pants, I ventured on another Eurolines bus from Rotterdam to Brussels.  I misjudged the distance between the North Brussels station and my preferred hostel, so I ended up walking for 45 minutes in a surprisingly hot sunny day with my heavy winter coat on and a heavy backpack.  Point being, by the time I got to the hostel (I highly suggest Meininger Hotel should you end up in Brussels) the lady at the front desk was legitimately concerned that I had some kind of health problem due to my excessive sweat and face redness, maybe MRSA or SARS or Acronym's Disease (AD).

After dropping my stuff off, I made my way back towards Grand Place, the heart (and tourist trap) of Brussels.  As a tourist, I immediately found myself trapped...in the majesty of "Eurohouse," a store filled with things covered in the EU flag.

 
Yes, that is a weird-looking EU toothbrush, and an EU thermometer.  Big Government Eurocrats shoving their healthcare down our throats!  The rest of the day I wandered aimlessly around the Grand Place area, checking out the always-unimpressive Mannekin Pis, drinking Belgian beers and absinthe at Delirium and the Green Fairy, and eating mussels and a durum (all hail the mighty rotating meat log).

The next day, I continued my aimless wandering around Grand Place until my friend Matt arrived in Brussels.  I had an especially fun time since, having checked out of the hostel, I was back to hauling a military-sized backpack ("Back-support the troops!") in my good ol' winter jacket carrying souvenirs I bought during my travels.  It felt like I was giving a piggyback ride to a school of rock children in a greenhouse.

Once I met up with Matt, my first order of business was unloading some of the rock children from the school bus, i.e. my back, i.e. my shoulders were going to fall off.  We located a Belgian "post office" in a convenience store inside of the central train station.  BPost (which sounds suspiciously like a fake rapper name, "Yo, sup BPost? It's TPain!") has graduated pricing based on your package's weight in kilograms, going up to 1 kg, then 1-2 kg, then over 2 kg, etc.  Of course, my package was 1.13 kg so I had to unpack-then-repack the box and keep some chocolate for myself (poor me...).  I'm fairly sure that removing the chocolate brought the weight to 1.01 kg, but my dawg BPost let it slide.

Afterwards, we went to Cantillon Brewery, which makes a really fantastic kind of beer known as lambic (the beer is exposed to "wild yeast" to ferment - specifically, the yeast that party way too hard for their own good).  I went on a brewery tour and tried some of their beers, which easily qualified as the best beer I've ever had.  We also grabbed some lunch nearby at a really great SomeKindOfHalalSomethingOrOther restaurant called Art Food, which had a TV broadcasting the Hajj.

Next stop: Leuven (pronounced "Lovin'" or "Lowvin" or "Loervin" or "Lois and Clark" or "I don't know how to pronounce you, so I'm gonna say La La Land").  I really enjoyed Leuven/La La Land.  My time there can be best described as a mix of high-quality beer tasting with pleasant sightseeing and good food interspersed, all in good company (Matt and his girlfriend Odette were fantastic hosts - thank you guys!).  I tried a wide array of famous beers, including Westvletern 12 (the #1 beer in the world, as they say).  I also tried something called advocaat which is essentially a pudding (I got pistachio flavored) mixed with some type of alcohol (strangely enough, advocaat is Dutch for lawyer - which explains why it's filled with alcohol).  Some of the places I saw were the Stella Artois factory (didn't go in - their beer sucks), the most spectacular City Hall of all time, Beetle on a Needle, Pater Damiaanplein (where apparently the hand of the Leper Priest is housed inside of this granite-looking box thing we saw) and the Beguinage (UNESCO World Heritage Site). Did I mention we moved a large, heavy cabinet across town by hand?  Also, this:

If there ever were a picture to describe the Dutch...

Anyways, on the last day of my trip, I went with Matt and Odette back to Brussels.  We took a pleasant, casual stroll to do a little "window shopping"...through the Brussels Red Light District.  It wasn't at all what you would expect, so long as you weren't expecting makeup-caked scantily-clad prostitutes hanging out in windows.  This was all just to get the delicious Turkish food nearby, I swear.  From there, we walked around parts of Brussels I had never seen even on my study abroad trip.  We stumbled upon a block party with all sorts of children's activities, as well as a very nice city garden.  Since Brussels has a Dutch (Flemish)-speaking population, of course we witnessed a bike accident along the way.  A little boy who was riding his bike alongside a parade of kids on bikes wiped out as they were going down a VERY steep road.  But he must have Dutch blood, because despite his fall (and I imagine painful scrapes) he popped right back up without complaining at all and refused help from an adult.  We also stopped into an English-language bookstore, where I found my new favorite book: Fifty Shades of Chicken.

                   
To make the transition back to the Netherlands easier, Brussels even gave me the perfect Dutch send-off: a bike festival or race or celebration or ritual sacrifice or something to that effect.  Basically, there was a lot of bike action covering entire city blocks, so I knew it was time to go.

In the interest of time, I'm going to end this post here, and catch up on everything since then in a separate blog entry...  

Today's Dutch lesson (aside from advocaat): lopen (to walk).  As in, Ik liep te veel (I walked too much).