Rotterdam

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After spending 3 days in Amsterdam to recover from our flight over from Australia and aclimatise to European conditions, it was time to begin our journey by train.

We spent our last day in Amsterdam doing a test train trip going to the nearby beach at Zandvoort an Nee, where it was a bit cold for a swim.

The trains in the Netherlands are easy to use with a mixture of double deck and single deck sets. You can simply jump on without having to reserve a seat.

Rather than go straight to Rotterdam we decided to stop off at Den Haag (which we were allowed to do under our train ticket). Den Haag is another nice city, with similar narrow streets and similar architecture to Amsterdam but less canals. It is also the head of all the political and royal governing bodies of the Netherlands, so we went for a walk to see the Palace but it was shut to tourists.

It was here that it started to rain. So after having lunch at McDonalds (only our 2nd time so far!) we caught a tram back to the station and continued our trip onto Rotterdam.

We arrived in Rotterdam later in the afternoon (around 4:30) but unfortunately the weather continued to be bad and after we arrived at our accommodation (by catching a nother tram) we didn't know what to do as it was still raining. Eventually we decided to head out and go for a walk in the rain as we only had the one night there.

Rotterdam is not as scenic as Amsterdam with few canals, more modern buildings and far more traffic. The tickets for the trams are pretty cool though. They use these things called Stripkaarts (strip cards) where you get this long card and have to stamp of a certain number of strips each time you travel.

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