Bikes Not Bombs

Hallo! Hoe gaat het?

(Hello, how's it going? pronounced hoo ghaht eht, with a gutteral sound for the g)

I still have not successfully spoken anything other than "Thank you" (Dank je wel - dahnk yeh vel) to a Dutch person. I'm hoping to learn more by the end of these six months, but the Dutch seem very good at English and very insistent upon speaking better English to us rather than deciphering our terrible Dutch. Luckily, I can practice my pronunciation by listening to the disembodied voice on the tram.

I promised photos, and here they are:

My room at Erasmus Lodge, 3rd floor.

3 huge windows.

My postcard collection from my lovely friend Megan Gianniny.

So much sunlight!

A map of the coast of Massachusetts, of course!

This is one of the many canals that wind around streets and buildings, seen from our kitchen window.

 Yesterday, Sunday, the international students went on a walking tour of the center of Rotterdam. The tour guide was extremely knowledgable and excited to tell us about her city, particularly to distinguish it from its rival city, the largest in the Netherlands, Amsterdam. She compared this to how a lot of largest and second-largest cities in countries have rivalries, particularly in sports, which made plenty of sense to me. Yankees suck, go Sox! Rotterdam is very proud of all that it has going for it- particularly architecture, which can be something outsiders poke fun at since the vast majority of buildings in Rotterdam's center are very modern, sometimes outrageously so. However the last thing you want to do when talking to someone from Rotterdam is make fun of its modernity, because of the history that explains it.

As we learned on the tour (and as most of us already had a vague idea) Rotterdam was brutally bombed by Nazi forces during World War II, in May of 1940. The city center was quite literally leveled to the ground- as the locals say, the canals were no longer in Rotterdam as Rotterdam was in the canals. Only a handful of buildings were spared from the bombings in the city center, my school (then a bank) being one of them, the post office, a medieval church, and City Hall, where you can still see bullet holes in the outer walls. Fire then devastated an even larger area of land and hundreds of thousands of homes. Today little red lights in the ground and red and white poles mark where the fire stopped, which is made obvious by the contrasting modernity and antiquity of the buildings side-by-side.

This sculpture stands in a plaza near my school, on the spot where Rotterdam's historic city center once stood. It has its heart ripped out of it.

We were told that a group of art students from Willem de Kooning wanted to fill in the hole, but were refused by the city government.

Knowing the history of Rotterdam has given me a more defined sense of living here, in a city which is so proud of its own existence and which fought so hard to continue being a city. It's been rebuilding for almost three-quarters of a century, and it's almost filled all of the empty space left by the bombing. Some of this space includes the Markthal (Market Hall) which is a massive, elongated arch-shaped building across the street from my school which, when completed, will be home to the Blaak Market, one of the largest open-air markets in Europe. I'm going tomorrow to get a bike lock and maybe some fresh produce!

On the tour we also passed through Witte de Withstraat, Rotterdam's Lower East Side. It's artsy, there are a lot of great bars and restaurants, and people are usually very drunk past 22:00 hours.

Not very exciting in the daytime.

The Erasmus Bridge, designed by an architect from Amsterdam. Bad idea. He didn't account for the wind and rain in Rotterdam and got a lot of engineers very angry when it malfunctioned several times. Looks like the Zakim Bridge to me...

And finally, last night the residents of Erasmus Lodge (almost all Willem de Kooning exchange students) held a potluck in one girl's flat on the top floor where there is a balcony and a spare room. It was quite gezellig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezelligheid), and lots of people came and put a surprising amount of effort into the dishes they brought. I'm very happy with how much everyone seems to want to hang out with each other in our building and amongst WdKA internationals, and I'm hopeful that this will result in many lovely Sunday night dinners and movie nights and morning yoga and group critiques, and a sense of community that is so hard to find back in New York.

There's my roommate and SVA classmate Jen on the far left.

Clara from Portugal, Mair (my other roommate) and Holly from the UK, Nateish from Canada, and me.

Oh and I got a bike! Yay! I am officially a resident of de Nederlands.

Dag,

Maggie