April 25, 2011- Today I went on an excursion to Rotterdam, a huge port city in the Netherlands. This was the final place I had on my list to visit in the Netherlands, and I was happy that we could go. For those of you who may not know, Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe and 3rd largest in the whole world. In 2009, 387 million metric tons of cargo went through the Rotterdam port. This port is huge and we were able to take a boat tour through the channel to see the huge cargo storage areas and massive cranes.
It was really cool to see how large of an operation they have running there. Rotterdam has always been a huge place where boats could access a large part of Europe. We saw some of the maritime history of the city by going to the Maritime Museum. This museum included an old coast guard ship called the Buffel that we could walk through. Inside this ship, we were shown what life was like living on a ship of that size and also how the boat functioned.
The actual museum part also showed more of the shipping industry in Rotterdam. Models of ships and a huge model of the whole port of Rotterdam were really cool to see. There were many interactive learning stations in the museum which were cool. I thought the museum was really interesting. The city of Rotterdam is a relatively new city due to the WWII bombings of the Germans which completely destroyed most of the city. Because of this, when the city was rebuilt, most of the buildings are very new looking with a more contemporary style. An example of this is the Kubus houses.
These houses look like giant cubes where people live. They were quite strange. After looking at these houses, we jumped on a train back to Amsterdam. This excursion was really cool and was one of my favorite excursions yet! It was really cool to see such a different city and important city in the Netherlands.
No comments:
Post a Comment