As noted in the last post, Rotterdam has a lot of funky cool modern architecture, often alongside some lovely old buildings that survived the war. This is an area called Museum Park – the tall tower is the most famous museum, called apparently Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, closed for renovation for a few years now. The mirrored round building is the “Depot” where ordinarily the main museum houses works not currently on display. At the top left is Het Nieuwe Institute, showcasing design and architecture. The reflections of large groups of school children out for some special evening of school-kid activities, all moving in real life and reflected below the mirrored skyline in the depot building, made the experience honestly rather magical for me 🙂
Yes, there’s air-bubble writing in that there canal. If you can tell me what it says, you’ll win my thanks :-). Rotterdam, as every Dutch person seems to know, is a much more hip and modern city primarily because it had to rebuild itself after being very heavily destroyed during WWII, so it decided to go quite modern in its rebuilt architecture. Stay tuned for more :-).
Biking home from tennis one evening, the sunlight caught this lovely field of bluebells so strikingly that I simply had to stop, hop off the bike, and snap some photos so as to share the beauty with you all 🙂
Winkel van Sinkel means “Sinkel’s Corner,” more or less, and this building housed the very first department store (selling multiple types of goods) in the Netherlands. Now it’s a cool restaurant and bar, beautiful both inside and out as you can see :-). Note the advertising campaign that plays on issues of the moment in the EU at large…
This is the Utrecht cathedral, a major portion of which was destroyed in (if I recall well) a storm many hundreds of years ago. There’s some kind of rebuilding thing happening, but I didn’t entirely follow whether they plan to rebuild the whole thing or not. (Image below: much of that is a painted canvas which I assume shows the future cathedral as planned?) Everyone knows Amsterdam’s a gorgeous city, but a lot of folks from outside NL aren’t aware of how many other quite charming and lovely mid-sized or small cities there are here. We’ll have several more posts of the sights of Utrecht ahead – and if you’re on the full version of this, you can also check for “categories” and then select “Netherlands, Utrecht” to see all the posts from here. (Or same logic for other places, because I do try to categorize and tag most posts so any of you considering a trip can consider what you want to see and do 🙂
(so much world, so little time....) 