Day 30: Rotterdam...again

the first "skyscraper" in Europe

Rotterdam architecture tour was on our agenda today.  We met up with the bus and low and behold their were 30 Korean students on it as well.  My teacher apparently arranged for us to share a ride with another UvA program.  Two girls in my group were ten minutes late and one Korean student told her teacher that they should "not be associated with this kind of behavior" and that they have their "reputations to look after." Thank you! I told my teacher that I thought our group was being disrespectful with time management last week...I should have been in the Korean group...  Anyways, the tour was super long and we saw a lot of weird but interesting buildings.  Rotterdam was pretty much obliterated during WWII so the city had to be completely rebuilt and even now there are many new construction projects.





One such project are the famous cube house, which are individual apartments raised up form the ground.  They are apparently very cheap and therefore lots of young people live in them.  We got to go inside one and it was so strange.  Also a major downside is the fact that all furniture pretty much needs to be custom made in order to fit against the slanted walls.

       

          the custom couch--and lovely cactus?

  Although I deem the cube house to be weird enough to be called a "fail" we did see some actual buildings that seriously failed.  Becky this will make you so sad, but the public library is one of the most hated buildings in  Rotterdam!  Apparently because of dutch frugalness the building only received partial funding from what it was originally promised and therefore came out cheap and ugly.  What are those tube things even supposed to be? Looks like a horrible apartment building/factory.

Side note: today was pretty ridiculous.  Some of the people in my group were beyond annoying today...I won't name names but lets just say they spent a good half an hour talking about the most vain crap on the bus and another half an hour talking LOUD about the groceries they needed.  At one point during a lecture, I looked over at Tracy and she was listening to her ipod, a girl fell asleep, and our teacher was interviewed on the street about KRS One and started rapping the lyrics to a song...he knew a lot.  It was also wavering on a monsoon slash tornado.  As is evidence in the picture that was meant to be me smiling nicely in front of the harbor.

Although certain buildings like the library are a little older and not so attractive, most of Rotterdam is very contemporary and still in process since Rotterdam is considered an up and coming city.  You can really see the urban planning that is going on and how within the next few years Rotterdam will shape into a very urban setting.   The architecture is very experimental and has a lot of nautical reference since this is the city where the cruise line Holland America was started.  To the right is a picture of the school for students to become captains of major sea vessels.  There are 26 escalators inside and that is how the students go to their classes.  It's also meant to look like the stern of a ship and the grass is in the shape of a boat deck.  









This is an apartment building in Rotterdam.  These cube-like structures are a part of the inner apartment, but are supposed to look like life boats on the side of a cruise ship...they do not really look like that to me but I see the connection.  A bit odd. 

At the end of the day we got back on the bus to go see some of the iconic windmills! Unfortunately, it had already been a very long day so we had to skip the originally planned walking tour.  So essentially we just got off for about ten minutes and looked from a distance and snapped some pics.  The funny thing was that the Koreans did not get off the bus at all and when we got back on they were all completely passed out.  There really were so many windmills and they are still functioning, which is cool.  Another fun thing was that there were lots of people out in front of their houses doing yard work and they were all actually wearing wooden clogs. And I thought that was just a tourist scam! Maybe I will actually get some and start a new trend...aka I will wear them and people will laugh and tease me and no one else will ever wear them too.  my life.