Friday August 29th… another travel day.
We had to be at the Gare du Nord (Paris train station) by 12.55 for the train to Rotterdam via Brussels (which they call Bruxelles) so we decided this left us time for a trip to the Sacre Couer. This meant we’d miss the Jardin du Luxemburg but you have to leave yourself something to do next time (other than setting aside 5 days for the louvre).
We crammed ourselves full of leftover supermarket food so we wouldn’t have to carry it and left our bags at the hotel, then picked a suitable stratagem for changing lines on the metro. Even though you are going halfway across Paris, the trip to Abbesses (metro station nearest SC) doesn’t actually take much more than 20 minutes, even with the line change. The trick being the Paris isn’t actually that big; but it is fairly dense, even without many big big buildings.
The Sacre Couer itself wasn’t that remarkable (having seen St. Peters and Notre Dame recently) although being smaller and much stricter about silence, no photos and so on it was nicer to sit down inside, and because you’re up on a hill the view back down to Paris is worth the trip.
The train trip to Rotterdam was kind of interesting, for several reasons. First, it was a TGV which meant we got to go real fast through the countryside, which I’ve never done before. Second, we had to change trains (and fill in an hour) at Brussels which was the only place in Europe so far that we’ve been asked to pay to use a toilet. The toilets have a gate and you have to put in your 50 cent piece to get in. Third, the train station in Brussels looks like it’s been recently imported from outer space, and they have spots marked on the floor where you stand under a cone up on the roof which reflects the sound down so that only people standing there can hear the news or weather or whatever. Fourth, our tickets had a distinct ‘1’ in the class section from Brussels to Rotterdam so we got in the 1st class carriage. There’s no allocated seats on that train so you just sit anywhere. Then the ticket man came along and explained that the 1 on that ticket means nothing, because we booked two journeys together the important info is on the first ticket. Which says 2nd class.
So we had to get up and move which was fine except that 2nd class was a lot more crowded. Luckily we found two seats and watched the countryside. The Netherlands really are flat. You expect them to flat, and they are in fact flatter that that.
First impression of Rotterdam was that it was busy without being crowded, in comparison to Italy and Paris. Rotterdam is also flat. Not as flat as a pancake, some pancakes have a sort of hump towards the middle.
The train trip took just over 4 hours so with a bit of map-finding and walking we didn’t check in until 6. After settling into our room our first task on venturing out was to locate some fries with mayonnaise, and having done that we wandered through the shopping centre, bought some sample slices of Dutch cheese (one 48 years old and the other 30 I think) and then hit the streets back to our hotel. On the way we discovered frosty cold cans of beer for 1.50€ – beer in the supermarket is cheaper but warm off the shelf – so we invested and drank those while walking.
For some reason almost all the wall space in our hotel is tiled, even in the lift. I’m not saying I don’t like it – I do – but it takes some getting used to.
Greg
