Rotterdam Lights

Tuesday evening after the Dutch Cafe was, in keeping with this ridiculously beautiful and unseasonable weather we are having, a really beautiful evening out, so, after going down into the metro, realizing that I had a 10 minute wait until the next train came anyway, and thinking that it just seemed particularly stuffy down there, I decided to walk to Beurs Metro, where I would be switching lines anyways.  It was such a nice evening for walking, and the general tenor of the whole area was just so conducive to strolling that I ended up walking all the way home, which was just about three miles.  The weather was perfect and it was just the perfect time to walk through town (I went the long way which goes around through the nicer/more business oriented part of town) because restaurants, but not bars, were starting to close so there were a fair number of couples strolling through town, as well as a lot of people out jogging.

The walking trip did make me wish that I 1) knew how to work the night photo settings on my camera, 2) had a tripod so I could take pictures at night without them turning out all jiggly looking, and 3) had even brought my camera with me at all.  Rotterdam has been designed to look awfully photogenic at night.  The cranes and ships in the Haven Museum are all lit up with colored spot lights (and there were quite a few people out taking pictures of it) plus almost all of the other buildings have decorative lights on them with stripes and designs in different colors and configurations.  The slant-y, leaning building that I have pointed out before, had all of its flashy green lights doing different pictures.  For a while it was doing a spinning globe, so that the different continents were going 'round and 'round.  Then it did a heart that would start out small, grow to fill the screen, and then go back to small again.  Then it had "1888" scrolling across the front of the building in numbers as tall as the building.  1888 is apparently the Dutch equivalent of "0"--it is directory inquiries.  If you look at this site, it shows a picture of the building with a giant heart on it.  If you want to see what Rotterdam really looks like at night (I am pretty sure that my pictures wouldn't look like this, even if I had taken my camera) you can go to this site to see a few pictures.

One other thing I noticed, as I was walking home, was that the Luxor Theater (a pretty famous theater in Rotterdam) is having, on October 11th, a concert of two of Carl Orff's works, the most famous being "Carmina Burana"--it is one of those pieces of classical music that everyone has heard, even if they don't know it, because it is used in television commercials all the time.  I happen to like Orff's oeuvre, so I am trying to decide if I should go and see it.  The super-cheap tickets are 25 euros and tickets go up from there to 48 euros, which is a little more than I really want to spend.  However, one hour before the show starts, they will give you a 50% discount with a student card (among other things) so, if any of the cheapo seats are still available, that might be a pretty good deal.  I wonder if I would have to get dressed up?  The Luxor Theater is nothing if not eclectic.  The program for the next month or so (which you can see here) covers everything from a flamenco-musical called "Zorro" to a Neil Diamond impersonator and last month they had a flying trapeze act in as well (and if you think that doesn't result in some dopey looking advertisements, you couldn't be wronger).

The Luxor Theater, looking north.  You can see the Erasmusbrug just to the right of the theater.  It is the tipi shaped thing over the road.