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From France, we took the Thalys speed train to the Netherlands. Our first stop was Rotterdam, one of the world's biggest ports. I didn't know much about it, but it was geographically on the way to Amsterdam, which everybody has heard of, so we stopped there.
Rotterdam was quite bombed out during the war so a lot of the historic buildings are gone. Amazingly, the Town Hall survived, however.
This contrasts nicely with the modern town centre...
This is the old harbour....
And these are the environs around the new harbour...
The bridge in the background of most of the pictures above is the Erasmus Bridge. This is a close up of it lifting to let a vessel on the waterway pass through...
Still on harbours, we went to the outskirts, to Delfthaven, which a long time ago used to be a bustling harbour, and if I am not wrong, even a country in its own right. The Pilgrims which sailed to America started off from there!
And that was about that for Rotterdam. The next day, Amsterdam beckoned....
