We continued up the English Channel through the night then
turned into the Nieuwe Maas River towards Rotterdam port. Very narrow, flat and
huge
seaport. Lots and lots of industrial, shipping—barges, cranes, trucks
and trains everywhere. We went through
a series of dikes-huge arms that close out the sea water during high tide to
prevent flooding of the area. We slid
by all this (both sides of the ship) for about 3 hours. Because of the size of the ship, we had to
go to the widest spot in the channel, turn around and then back up for 2 miles
to get into the dock. We then saw the
“other” side of the channel with a great view of Rotterdam. It’s interesting to see some of the dock
workers stop and watch the ship…I’m sure it’s an impressive sight. Everybody in the water seems to be getting
out of the way. Super interesting
morning. We finally docked at noon.
And then the day fell apart. Never seen the lack of organization everywhere we went. All independents (us—those not on a Princess
tour) were to gather in one of the dining rooms. We obeyed…the captain announced clearance so we stood up to go
out. There were a bunch ! of people in
there…not just the group we were with.
So, 10 minutes later, a couple of the young female crew stood up in
chairs and tried to make an announcement…such as, we are not cleared yet..or a
minute later, due to a “technical problem”, the gangway has been moved to a
deck down, further down the ship. So we
all trouped out there.
Finally outside, we were to catch the tram to the train
station. All you could see for forever
were big motorcoaches…no sign of a tram.
We kinda got herded toward a bus and a few dozen people all asking the
driver the same thing..does this go to the train station. These were the Princess shuttle buses which
we were not going to use, but that’s all we could find. Asking the drivers, bless their hearts, was
fruitless. They didn’t seem to know where they were going and finally said,
no train station, but it was walking distance from one of their stops. (all Princess info stated clearly: Shuttles stop at City Hall and Train
station) So, we loaded up. By this time, our train station grouped had
dwindled to about 8. Not sure where the
others ended up. It was chaos.
Driver explained which of the two stops to get off to walk
to station. So, we managed that just
fine….2-3 blocks. But, then, the train
station. Nothing was in English…just
Dutch. We finally found a room that
said “Service and Tickets” , so we crowded into it to take a number In order to
get in a line to get to a ticket agent.
They were on number 282 and we were 351. While Ronnie stood in line, another lady and I went out to find
some info….this just didn’t seem like a very good way to simply buy a ticket
for the train. In fact, she loudly made
a comment that she’d never, in all her travels, had such a hard time getting on
a train, just as a train agent walked by.
He smiled and covered his ears and said, please tell that to the station. So, she and I walked out to a line of kiosks
and to a young man there answering questions and speaking very good English.
Keep this in mind:
This was not just us. There were
foreign languages of all kinds being spoken – well, foreign accents, anyway. So others were having problems too. Well, evidently, the kiosks would take debit
cards, cash and coins OR a chipped credit card. Well, Chase (our cc company) made a huge issue of sending us new
chip credit cards and said they would be perfect for use in Europe…much
safer. Funny, they emphasized that they
require no pin number to have to remember; just swipe and sign. NOT TRUE.
The station kiosks only took Chip and PIN cards. Back to the line inside.
We had missed the express train before we even arrived at
the station, so the regular train was an hour and half one way. The wait time for the train wasn’t so bad,
but the wait time in line was another 30 minutes. So, we are calculating how much time would we actually have in
Amsterdam. The ship doesn’t leave til
midnight, but the shuttle buses quit at 8 p.m.
So, there and back, time for the sights, walking back to pickup
station….we were past 8 p.m. At that
point, we are on our own to get back to ship unless we could find one certain
tram that runs out this way.
Ronnie gave our ticket away and we and a few more just left
to go see Rotterdam. Ronnie then looked
for a bank to exchange dollars for euros—we were running low—and I logged on to
station wifi and tried to post my blog.
By the time I got the ireland blog done, my battery had run down…so that
didn’t work like we planned, either.
But we enjoyed the day anyway, just walking around the city.
When we got into the city, which is huge, by the way, I thought it was a
pretty neat, clean place. We definitely
left the 16th century architecture and went right into the new,
modern, almost abstract architecture.
Most of Rotterdam was destroyed during WWII, so there’s been a huge
amount of building done over the past 70 years. Here and there, you’ll see an old building that escaped the
bombs, but they are few and far apart.
To their credit, they have preserved the older buildings and did not tear them down for new construction.
Down the huge City Centre Mall area, on Tuesdays and
Saturdays, they set up a market area..supposedly fresh veggies, local
arts/crafts, etc. Well, we got there
just at closing and it was filthy.
Trash was flying everywhere, everywhere. Orange peels and lettuce leaves…all over. I was shocked at the trash blowing around
all up and down the mall area. There
are nice stores but overshadowed by all this.
I didn’t really have a “good” feeling about Rotterdam. Interesting city, with pretty buildings, but
very, very busy. Buses, trams, cars,
bicycles (even have their own bicycle
lanes between the sidewalks and streets—I’m talking wide, paved, with curbs)
and people from all over. You sometimes
crossed a street, a bike lane, a tram lane and hoped you made it across. I’m just not European enough for this city,
I guess. Between all our walking and
the shuttles, we got to see a great deal of the city. There’s a very large amount of barges and other water traffic
going up and down the river all the time.
One interesting thing we saw in Rotterdam were these little
“cube” houses or apartments. Everything
is built on an angle. Driver said that
many people can’t adapt to living there because of dis-orientation. I would be one of those people. They sell for around 250,000 Euros.
Anyway, we’re disappointed that we didn’t make Amsterdam,
but maybe there’ll be another time.
Tomorrow is another sea day and I’m glad…tired. Then Hamburg where our plans are to visit
the Miniatur Wunderland, which I hear is great. I made reservations for a time slot online. Today I got an email about it, but it was
all in German and I wasn’t sure what it said, so we decided to ask around on
the ship. First person we asked waiting
on the elevator said he could a little.
He read enough to let me know what it said…he said he hadn’t used his
German in years…proud of himself.
Weather is beautiful even tho the ship’s forecast called for
100% chance of rain today. You’d think
we were at home with our local weathermen.
Oslo Fijord. We saw the ski jump from the winter olympics
along with the olympic village from years past (whenever the winter olympics
were last held here). The sea gulls were out in force…I actually fed
two from the balcony….potato chips from
my hand. Cool. Beautiful area. Huge homes along the
fjiord. A wealthy country. We supposedly saw “the slums”….ummmm…they
don’t know slums. 
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