Hotel Turkuaz Rotterdam

Well, the trip has finally started! After getting up way too early (nerves I guess) and repacking my backpack twice, I traveled to Schiphol. I tried to get a seat with enough room for my legs, but unfortunately those seats were already reserved. (So why does it say on the China Airlines website that those seats cannot be reserved?) Here we (a friend of mine who's also going to Bangkok and I) enjoyed a last meal on Dutch soil (a nice tosti) and afterward we boarded the Boeing 747 to Bangkok.

So this is an incomplete version of events with no pictures while I am using up time in an internet café - I will update it when I can.

Revellers coming into the dorm at 3.30am made for another disturbed nights sleep so I decided not to rush myself out in the morning. Had breakfast and prepared stuff for check out at 10.30...

Not quite well enough as it turned out - it was 11.20 by the time I finally handed back the key cards - this was primarily due to trying ...

We left our hotel, which was a former palace, in Dutant, Belgium, and traveled to Brussels, Belgium this morningl What a beautiful place! Their square, called the Grand Place, is certainly that! It is absoltuely beautiful!! This is one of those places where I would love to come back and spend much time just looking around. This city really has an appeal to me.

Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands wichitap2p

... of the ball. I certainly didn't expect to be going but it was just off the main hall where I was able to hang out without any trouble... and the door was open so in I went for a sticky-beak. I must say the ball was pretty good. They had a dj (in the traditional sense of the word) playing some pretty good Esperanto and other music. They also had a bar going. It was pretty interesting watching the Esperantists interact. I had the ...

... preferable to starving myself Scandinavia! First stop of the day - Delft. There wasn't any luggage storage at the station, but luckily the TI lets you leave your bag there. It's yet another nice, touristy Dutch town, and it's famous for Delftware, ceramics decorated with intricate blue designs. I popped into La Candelaer, one of the Delftware factories - nothing going on inside, except the burning of money. A ...

Next we went to Rotterdam. They say that you spend money in Amsterdam, live in Den Haag, and work in Rotterdam, which explains why there was not much going on in that city, its mostly industrial. They've got a river and a couple cool momuments or musuem, but our tolerance for extreme temperatures wasn't high. It even snowed there and stuck to ...

... I noticed a growing number of red lights set above the windows lining the street. A minute or two later (I have grown incredibly slow) I finally realized that I had wandered into the red light district of Den Haag. I quickly (well, not that quickly) made my way to greener (or at least more conservative) pastures. My first, but definitely not last, experience with a red light district in The Netherlands.

... works. Very interesting. The Van Gogh museum itself is a fantastic museum for someone who normally doesn't like art museums, or doesn't know that much about art or Van Gogh. It's a very manageable size, it flows very naturally and keeps you engaged by going through the artist's life chronologically, showing you pieces of art that epitomize certain periods of his life along with his story. My mother however, is very interested in and knowledgeable ...

... door and wall colours are very similar and in the bedrooms the walls are white as are the light switches, etc. All a bit institutional and could be problems with persons with colour differentiation issues. This is an 'umcompromising modernist design' - the architects own words! It is a very nice building and resonse to the site but not very home like or domesticated. Then again its not trying to be and was never intended from the outset to be anything but modern.

... looks like it could be fun. Captain Teige takes us to the "cut line" This is where, once the welders have cut the sides of the ship open, will cut across the top to complete the seperation. I could stay here for hours, just watching the employees do their work. But all too soon, it's decided that we have to go back to the bus and to our hotel. After dinner with the group at our hotel, we walk around town, past the modern buildings and old cut stone houses.