Last night I dreamt that I was at the hostel with two groups of people; one was German, the other Italian. They were trying to communicate to each other but were having problems, so I said I could be their translator. This is funny for several reasons: one - there's no way I could do this in reality; my command of the Italian language is fair, and German is pretty poor. Both are still better than my Dutch, though I've been realizing it's getting easier to read and understand. But on the other hand, I know why this was packed into my subconscious: it's easy for me to identify Italian tourists and German tourists (and Spanish tourists). At the hostel last night they were showing the Italian soccer game (I think they were playing Spain?) and a whole bunch of Italian visitors were going wild.
Anyway, as for today,
I got an early breakfast and headed out on the tram to the west. The tram routes in Rotterdam are silly, as
they take lots of strange turns. I got
out at the Spangen district specifically to see some housing by Michiel
Brinkman from the early 1900s, but a lot of it was undergoing some sort of
renovation, and it started to sprinkle rain so I didn't get any good
images. There wasn't much going on in
that area. I walked up farther along a
busy highway in order to make my way to the Van Nelle Factory. This is located in a really industrial area
of Rotterdam, as evidenced by my having to take a set of stairs from the
highway viaduct to get to the right elevation.
This building is a classic, though, in the period of modernity, designed
by Michiel Brinkman's son, J. A. Brinkman.
It's main themes are lightness, air, and space. I would have liked to visit the interior, but
it's closed unless you work in the offices (not a factory anymore). It was also raining a little here, but I
managed to snap a few shots.
After that I took the
tram out to the north to see a few other more contemporary housing
projects. They all seem to relate to
each other in various ways, of course the most obvious would be materiality -
brick mainly - but the interesting relation is how they use these materials
with a subtle shift in dimensionality, which often produces shadow joints. In order of how I
visited them: Houzing Zaagmolen, Orkide, Marnixstraat, Bergpolderflats, and
Ammersooiseplein housing. The
Bergpolderflats were also designed by Brinkman and van der Vlugt, an example of
the existenz-minimum / Dutch Nieuwe Zakelijkheid (New Objectivity). Very compelling. Along the way I also saw Mecanoo's
contemporary design for the small Chapel St. Mary of the Angels. All very interesting.
I walked back through
the Delftse region, which apparently has an urban plan borrowed from the Delft
logic. I will have to compare when I
visit Delft soon.
I was pretty lucky all
day, considering it only rained lightly, and when I got back that's when it
started pouring torrentially. There was
also some thunder and lightning which was pretty cool to watch over the port
from my window. But the bad part was
that I still needed to venture out to get some food. I had made up my mind that I was going to try
this restaurant that I had seen on my walk back. So out I went into the pouring rain. Of course, what I thought was going to be
very easy to find proved nearly impossible.
Not entirely so, however, because once my shoes were good and spongy, I
finally found the place. And then I
realized that I didn't want to eat there, because it looked really fancy and
stuffy, and everyone was there with their significant others and that made me
book it out of there pretty fast.
Instead, I tried this place called Restaurante Napoli, a great little
Italian place. The people there were
originally from Naples, and I was able to speak to them in a little Italian
(ironic, right). I got a quattro stagoni
pizza - real Italian pizza I've not had a chance to eat in almost 2 years (how
has it been that long since my semester abroad??). It was quite good, but I did feel kind of
awkward by myself there too. Oh
well. The food filled my belly and I
squished back to the hostel to finish this post.
Tomorrow the weather
doesn't matter too much as I have all of the museums in my plans. There's a high chance that I will get
everything done in Rotterdam that I want to do by tomorrow or by the end of the
day on Wednesday. I've decided that I
want to make an unscheduled trip to Maastricht, a city that was not originally
in my proposal. It's farther away in
South Holland, outside of the Ranstad (the Ring), and it takes ~2hrs by
train. I think that could make a really
nice day trip. We shall see.
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