Today is our last full day in Rotterdam and its a bit of a grey one, so we are going to pick up the last few things we want to do here. It’s cool. but not cold, so I declined to take my jacket for a walk today. We started with breakfast near the railway station again and repeated the ham and cheese toastie and a coffee. Feeling a little decadent, we added Portuguese Tarts (straight from the oven) to the menu.
Once fed, it was time to find a tram and make our way to the Euromast which is an observation tower constructed between 1958 and 1960. It was specially built for the 1960 Floriade show and was listed as a national monument in 2010. The tower is a concrete structure built on a concrete block of 2 tonnes so that the centre of gravity is below ground to prevent it falling over. It has an observation platform 96 m (315 ft) above ground and a restaurant. In 2008, 2009 and 2019, the tower hosted an extreme sports event which featured BASE jumping. There was a group abseiling off it today as well. Before going up to the observation deck, there is an immersive film presentation about the ancient history of the area and how the dam on the Rotte River built around 1260 changed the area from swamp to farming land. Here’s a couple of photos from the observation deck.
The parkland where Euromast was built is called Het Park, located on the Maas River in central Rotterdam. The park is 21 hectares and is the city’s largest nationally listed green space. It was originally designed in 1852 and is typically European in appearance with lakes and trees and some beautiful flower gardens which I am sure would be more splendid in the spring. Apart from being a relaxing natural space it also hosts numerous music events through the year and it does have an inappropriately named ‘Midget Golf’ course. I assumed that at 195cm, I would not be allowed in.
We strolled through the park taking photos, so here is a couple of the good ones.
After walking through the park made our way to the main Museum precinct to the ‘Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen’ that is popularly called ‘The Pot‘ and is actually is an art depot. It was designed to store valuable artworks above sea-level and is the first publicly accessible art depot in the world. The building is a 39.5 metre high, bowl-shaped building that is covered with reflective plates. The plates create a reduced mirror image of the surrounding environment providing a spectacular, but different view of the cityscape. The spaces inside are used to hold temporary exhibitions and while not to my taste, there were plenty of paying patrons there.
As we walked out of the Museum Precinct we passed the Chabot Museum, which is in-fact a small private collection of his works, not a Chatbot Museum, (my reading of the sign at first glance), which I can’t imagine being very interesting. We were getting hungry by this time and we found ourselves on Witte de Withstraat, one of the eating districts. One challenge we have found here is getting something other that bar snacks or burgers. There are some high-end restaurants, but the google estimates of 100+ euros are a bit scary. It reminds us how lucky we are to always find our normal quota of vegetables. After much deliberating and menu reading we settled on a place and Deb had a Caesar Salad and I had Salmon and Coleslaw dish – nice, but didn’t really solve the vegetable craving.
With no further local ‘big ticket’ items left on the list for today, we went back to the hotel for a quiet afternoon. Being our last night in town we thought we’d go out for dinner. The hotel recommended a chinese restaurant, but it was heavily booked and noisy, so we opted for a Japanese BBQ place a few doors down. We had a sushi entree and then a set of selected meat on the BBQ plate. It was a delicious and relaxed way to finish our time here in Rotterdam.
Until tomorrow!
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