Rotterdam, The Netherlands

At just gone 7 this morning the intercom in my cabin came to life and a friendly lilting Dutch voice informed the ship we were approaching Hoek van Holland – the “Corner of Holland” (here’s one for the fact fans: the name Holland actually refers to an area to the west of the country, and shouldn’t be used as a term for the country as a whole, although it is commonly so used – The Netherlands is the correct term for the land of the Dutch). I packed up my stuff and made my way up to the lobby to mingle with the other sleepy-haired passengers to wait for the boat to dock.

The cold was biting as I walked down the gangplank to emerge at the small train station. Dawn had just started to break, a beautiful glow bringing warmth to a corner of the sky. Standing at the tracks of a lonely European outpost at the break of dawn infused me with an intense thrilling feeling I can still recall to this day as I retrospectively write this, reflecting the excitement of the journey ahead and the seemingly limitless freedom that I had for the foreseeable future.

I missed one train whilst still trying to work out the timetable and ticket options, but jumped on the next, which saw me sharing a carriage with sleepy Dutch commuters onward to the city of Rotterdam thirty kilometres eastwards.

The city had woken up, stretched and was well on its way to a breakfast of cold meats and cheeses by the time the train pulled into Rotterdam Centraal. The square outside the station was having a major refit, with roadworks everywhere. The buildings opposite, however, looked very impressive: modern new skyscrapers with shiny reflective windows. One of the two things I knew about Rotterdam was that it was a major centre for architecture. The other was that it was full of foreigners – around 50% of the population were not native Dutch. I added to their number as I wandered through the shopping district and down to the  pretty part of the port where my hostel was located.

I’d picked a place called ROOM Hostel. In keeping with the cutting edge feel of Rotterdam, the place was a stylised “art hostel”. Each of the rooms had been decorated in a different creative theme to represent a different aspect of the city. My  colourful dorm room made a welcome change to the identikit YHA hostels I’d bunked down in throughout Germany.

Later that day, after a productive work session on the new lapper, I headed back into the shopping district to revisit an item that had caught my eye. Long before I even started my semi-nomadic wanderings, I had stopped buying “stuff” and had de-cluttered by selling, giving away or ditching a lot of the crap I owned. One of the few things of note I’d purchased in the last few years was an  enjoyable Lichtenstein oil painting (not an original, surprisingly enough!), and yet again, a framed picture had caught my interest.

Five minutes and a mere twenty euros later, I was hefting a pretty (if ever so slightly pretentious, labelled in Latin as it was)  framed print of the United Kingdom through the streets back to the hostel for the evening.

So much for travelling light.