🇳🇱 2023 Spring Rotterdam

It's the Easter holiday and we both need to go to the Netherlands for work, so we took a few days off to have a proper week in the Netherlands for tulips. I've been to Amsterdam before because I missed my flight and had to stay overnight to wait for the next flight. I haven't been to other cities in the Netherlands, so we picked Rotterdam as the starting point of our trip.

We woke up early on Sunday to catch our Eurostar to Rotterdam.

I still can't believe that we got lost the moment we stepped out of the Rotterdam train station. It was supposed to be a ten-minute walk, but it took us almost half an hour because my Google Maps kept pinning us in the water instead of on actual land.

After a bit of struggle, we arrived at City Hub Rotterdam, our home for the next few days. It's a capsule hotel with comprehensive facilities and a great location on Witte de Withstraat, which I think is the most bustling street in Rotterdam. We put our luggage in the room and started to walk to the old port, where Markthal and Cubic house are.

Markthal is just a huge food hall with lots of food, that's it. The architecture is quite unique and impressive, that's it. We didn't find anything too special to eat, so ended up with dumplings and egg tarts. Cubic house is just five minutes walk from Markthal. People actually live inside those Cubic houses! There is a museum where you can see what it's like to live inside a cubic, but we didn't go in. Walk down from the Cubic house is the port, there are some pubs and restaurants, could be a good idea to grab a drink here with the view.

On our way back, we were thinking what to have for dinner.

And suddenly, I saw a climbing wall for kids. Of course, I had to demonstrate how to climb properly to those newbies.

To reward me for the great climbing, we went to a Korean fried chicken restaurant called SOJU. It's really good and I highly recommend it!

The weather was not promising the next day. It was drizzling in the morning when we were walking to Erasmus Bridge. The original plan was to take the Spido boat for a harbour tour, but we didn't do it because of the weather.

We then headed to Rotterdam Cathedral. I actually couldn't remember whether we got there or not because it started raining quite heavily on our way. We stopped at a cafe and hoped for the weather to cooperate.

The weather wasn't cooperating. It was still raining heavily after almost an hour, so I suggested going back to rest (you can see how the weather affects me... moody Zippy). On our way back to the hotel, we walked pass Rotterdam Natural History Museum, two science nerds decided to give it a go. It was what we expected, it is nicely curated and quite similar to other natural history museums. One exhibition that caught my eye was about how human activities impact urban animal habitats. The exhibition used a fox as the main character to face different situations and discuss how those impact different animals.

Before heading back to the hotel, we were thinking of buying some stroopwaffles as our late-night snack. Lots of people online recommended Didi's Stroopwaffels. We checked its opening time on Google Maps. We should still have time, but we walked over to find that it was closed. I stood in front of the shop window, drooling.