9.20.22

I am pretty excited to be checking out of our Airbnb today and headed to Rotterdam, mostly because we have a hotel in Rotterdam and I’m hoping for a good nights sleep. I think that Nick is right in that the people staying above us most likely live there and they get off work late, arriving home in the wee hours of the morning or they are much younger than us and can hang longer sightseeing. I had the worst nights sleep last night, yesterday’s sore throat continued to get worse making it hard to sleep.

After a nice hot shower, we headed out into Brussels for one last view of the Grand Palace and we ended up finding the cutest breakfast place, which was recommended to us by Jose (our Asian waffle teacher) the day before. 

We sat down at Woodpecker 47, and I quickly ordered a ginger shot in hopes of it knocking whatever this is out. We each enjoyed coffees, and I had a delicious plate  of pancakes with berry compote and white chocolate mousse, and Nick a waffle topped with mushrooms, poached egg and hollandaise sauce.  This was a nice little treat to send us on our way. We returned to the apt to retrieve our bags and headed to the train station to catch our train to Rotterdam.

This will be our first time in Rotterdam and I have planned nothing, this is Nick’s architecture stop, so hopefully he’s got a fun day planned for us!

We arrived at the train station quite early, so I walked around the little shops, grabbed a hot tea and Nick practiced his Italian. Earlier in the day I offered to take a photo for a couple in the Grand Palace square, after returning their phone Nick gave me crap for not speaking Italian to them.  Pretty confident I’m not the one taking lessons and HE missed an opportunity to practice.

As we waited at the track for our train, which thankfully ended up being delayed, we had trouble finding our car. The gentleman told us to speak to the train manager who was unable to find our tickets upon scanning them. He scrolled through my email to inform us our tickets were booked for August 20th, but he could help us out for this full train. Another €200 later, we were seated on jump seats on our way to Rotterdam. 

He was kind enough to find us two empty seats after we stopped in Antwerp in first class. Not sure they were worth the €300 total spent, but nonetheless we made it.

We walked to our hotel, dropped our bags and off we went to find some food. We ended up at the Rotterdam Markthal, Nick had some fried fish, I’m not quite sure what I had. It was called The Roma, it was cheese, pesto, sun dried tomatoes and arugula wrapped in thin bread and toasted on a griddle.  

Afterwards, we visited some of the buildings Nick had wanted to see, including the cube houses (we did the “museum tour”), Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaaus projects. To get there little did we know we walked across one of Rotterdam’s top ten attractions, the Erasmus bridge. Thankfully Nick allowed us to bring the metro back as it was getting pretty chilly. After a stop in a coffee shop, then the grocery, and a quick trip back to the room to warm up we made our way to a bier garden nearby to get drinks and a bite to eat before calling it a night.