Wereld Haven Dagen

On Friday, since it was so beautiful again, I went out walking around Rotterdam.  I didn't realize, until I got to Erasmusbrug, that there is a celebration of some kind going on.  Apparently, right now is "Wereld Haven Dagen" or "World Port Days".  There were food booths and cotton candy and popcorn and rides and bouncy castles and prizes and games and everyone in Rotterdam was trying to walk across the Erasmusbrug at the same time as I was.  It was packed.  They were having boat races of some kind and there were Dutch flags and blaze orange everywhere ("Wereld" notwithstanding, I didn't see any foreign flags).  You could hear people chanting and singing but I couldn't understand what they were saying.  I could understand the race announcer though.  He said "Not yet (nog neit), not yet, not yet, not yet, he's not in the clear yet!" and then they had a photo finish.  So it sounded exciting.  At one point the announcer said "okey-dokey" which, I assume, is just an adopted English word and which I thought was quite entertaining.

I know this picture doesn't look very crowded but it really was.  They just weren't all here right now.










This is the Caland Memorial.  It honors Peter Caland, the guy who designed the new waterway, built in the end of the 19th century, which enabled Rotterdam to remain the largest shipping port in the world until relatively recently (and it still remains the largest shipping port in Europe).  The really, incredibly massive Europort was built as an extension of Caland's "Nieuwe Waterweg" or "New Waterway."

The statue used to be in the city center but, shortly before WWII began, it was moved to its present location where it survived the bombings.  Apparently the place where it was previously located was totally destroyed.



Below is a map from "Google Maps" that I added stuff to.  The Nieuwe Waterweg is marked with the bright blue line and the little "A" bubble.  The approximate location of the Europort is marked by the light blue oval.

Also, note that I have marked Rotterdam in purple and the little red arrow points to where I live.  The northernmost big river, that heads through Rotterdam is the Maas (or Muese).  The river that heads to the south (and on through most of Europe) is the Rijn (or the Rhine).

This picture is from one of the ports where private boats are kept.  You can't really see it as much as I had hoped you could, but there are these old fashioned sailing type boats and then behind them are huge, fancy, super expensive, brand new boats.  There were people sitting on their boats eating lunch and relaxing and just piles of people walking along and looking at things.  There were loads of police as well.  Some of them were riding segways, which, I admit, probably answers a transportation need but ever since "Arrested Development" I have had difficulty in taking anyone who rides those things seriously.

This building is the Atlantic Huis.  Note the Art Deco design.  I was puzzled by this at first, since Art Deco was a pre-WWII design style but there were several buildings in the area that had distinctly Art Deco architecture and design and several had the date of their construction inscribed as being in the 19teens.  So apparently this part of Rotterdam was not as severely damaged as the city center during the German bombardments.
This building was built in the late 1920s.  It was one of the first apartment buildings in the Netherlands and it is still used for that purpose.  If you wanted to live here now, you could get a 600 square foot, one bedroom apartment for only 574,000 euros (that's about $850,000).  The website where you can check out the floor plan is here: http://www.atlantichuis.nl/main.html.

Apparently, the stained glass panels along the front of the building depict the history of Dutch shipping and trade and somewhere on the facade there are depictions of Hermes (the Greek god of commerce) and Neptune (the Greek god of the sea), which fits in nicely with an Art Deco building set on a Dutch pier.

There were several booths around (it looked a lot like a county fair).  Some of them were giving out balloons and there were a bunch of guys standing around with handfuls of balloons, breathing in helium and cracking themselves up by talking in squeaky voices.  I stopped at this booth because the slogan on their sign says "DEME: creating land for the future" and there are pictures of the land reclamation process, which just strikes me as fascinating (I just wonder who was the first guy who said "I bet if we build a wall we can bail out the Atlantic Ocean and start growing some cows there instead!")

To be polite I asked "Mag ik een foto maken?" (May I take a picture?)  I had to repeat myself twice before she understood what I was saying but she finally answered me (in Dutch, which means success!) with "'Tuurlijk!" which is an abbreviation for "natuurlijk" which means "of course!"

This is a memorial for Dutch sailors from one particular company (I think) who died during WWII.

The small plaque in front says "In memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice in the service of Rotterdam Lloyd during the Second World War."

There was a ship called the Rotterdam Lloyd but its dates are wrong, so I think that this is reffering to the sailors who worked for the Dutch company that tried to keep up contact with Dutch colonies and holdings in the Indies during the War.

One of the places that I wanted to see was the Belasting & Douane Museum--that is to say "The Tax and Customs Museum."  According to the museum's website "you can learn everything about taxes that we have to pay today and that our ancestors had to pay in their day.  There are more than 100 different taxes that you can learn about!" (exclamation point theirs).  That seems like the kind of place that you just ought not to miss.  Unfortunately, after I had walked around the entire block looking for the building, I noticed this:

The museum is under construction and you can't visit it.  I was sad.  On the plus side, the sign says that the museum will reopen "medio juni 2012" or, mid June, 2012.  So, if it opens as scheduled, there will still be a chance for me to see it before I leave.  If the workmen's diligence and industry is at all proportional to the loudness, and off-key-edness, of their singing, then it might even be done earlier.

This link goes to an English language site about the museum:
http://www.cityguiderotterdam.com/thingstodo/museums/belasting-en-douane-museum/en
About half-way down the page there is a video player that does a little mini-tour of the museum.  It is all in Dutch but it is still pretty easy to follow anyways.  They discuss the taxes on paper and playing cards, imports, land, alcohol, etc.  You will hear the words "betaling" and "collectie" a lot, which mean payment and collections.  Toward the end of the video, there is a little view of the smuggling "trip" that is available for kids.  As far as I can tell, it looks like the kids go into a tiny basement room and watch a video about smuggling, but maybe I can kind of crouch down and sneak into the show when I go.




Despite this little disappointment, however, it was a beautiful part of town, on a really beautiful day, and I had a really nice walk.  This tree lined walk is not part of Het Park (which I mentioned earlier) (I don't think) but when you get to the end of it, the park is just across the road.  It was warm enough and sunny enough that the shade was a nice relief (I am still pinkish colored the day after) and it was fun to stroll along here.











As I was walking along this path, though, I looked over and saw this through the trees:
In case you can't see it very well (the letters kind of blend with the sky), the building says Erasmus MC--it is the Erasmus Main Campus.  I wonder if a lot of students hang out in the park during the school year.  I think that that would be inclined to make it noisier.










On the way back from the park, when I walked down the other side of this, long, grassy, rectangle (I don't actually know what it is), I noticed that it smelled an awful lot like autumn.  It is funny to think about autumn so soon, but the beech trees are turning yellow and losing all of their leaves and so the wind, and your footsteps, sound all rustley and everything smells liked dried, moldering leaves.  It was a very nice walk home.

As a side note, I just looked up sunrise/set times and, in the month that I have been here, I have lost almost 2 hours of daylight.   I am down from 15 hours and 27 min. per day to 13 hours and 32 min. per day. So I guess that it is getting on toward fall.  At this rate, it could be a long, dark winter.