2025 Europe – Day 1 – Rotterdam

Welcome to the 2025 edition of the ‘Beats Working’ blog, an account of our holiday for this year. Without giving too much away, this trip takes us through The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. One thing I can share is that Europe is a long way from Australia and this time we took the Emirates option, that leaves Brisbane at 2 AM on Tuesday and we arrived in Rotterdam at 11 PM on Wednesday. The Emirates experience was very good, we ate well and we both managed a bit of sleep on the way. Dubai airport seemed eerily quiet for the changeover, but we didn’t mind at all.

We flew into Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and then transferred to our hotel in Rotterdam. Schiphol lived up to it’s reputation of being one of the busiest airports in the world, as they tried to process a large group of arriving passengers with only 4 processing officers. It was mildly amusing to watch those on UK passports have to line up with the foreigners. I think that it would be good if Australia became a member of the EU, so I could use the the E-Gates.

Upon our arrival in Rotterdam, getting some proper sleep was the priority. We were up at about 7:30 and decided that we would do some exploring on foot. Our first stop was across the road to the central railway station to organise transport tickets and find some breakfast, a nice coffee and a croissant being my favoured option. We did find the city to be very quiet at this time of day, but like most european cities it got busier as the day wore on.

We walked along the old canal which has some nice parkland along it’s edges. The canals now only provide aesthetic value, but the result is some classic dutch scenes for us to take in. These canals are lined with lots of sculpture and support quite a variety of birdlife, including these massive northern hemisphere seagulls, that are around double the size of our ones. They still like chips though.

From there we went to the Central Market, which is really a collection of international takeaway outlets, very few that have a dutch flavour. The space is amazing though. We identified a good cheese shop and salami seller for tonight’s dinner.

Rotterdam was largely levelled by bombing during World War 2, so there is not a lot of old buildings here. This has presented opportunities for innovative architects to create on the ‘blank canvas’. We visited 2 very different examples. The first was the ‘Cube houses’ that are a set of innovative houses built and designed by architect Piet Blom. They challenge the ideas of conventional residential architecture by tilting the cube shape on its corner. Secondly, we visited St Laurences Church which has been wonderfully restored following the war damage, provisionally completed in 1968. There has been a church on this site since 1465.

We had lunch at a Vietnamese styled restaurant in the central market before rounding out our day at the Maritime Museum. This museum documents the history of the port of Rotterdam that has been operating for some 800 years. Many different neighbourhoods have sprung up as different products were transited through the port, from sugar and tobacco from the Carribean and spices from Indonesia. Rotterdam was constant fixture in the slave trade for over 200 years, but more recently been a major oil port for western Europe.

We came back to to our room via the Erasmus Bridge before finding some cheese and salami at the markets to make up a light dinner platter.

Until tomorrow!