On Saturday we started early – 7:30 am. We began what we thought was a short walk to the railway station. As it turned out, it was a walk of close to an hour. There were very few people on the streets at that time of the day. But the few who were, were very helpful to us as we made our way through the strange city.
Putten is a small town. The entire town seems like out of a storybook. I could almost imagine Hansel and Gretel walking the streets that Saurabh and I walked.
After over an hour’s walk we reached the station. There we discovered that Putten was not large enough to maintain a manual ticket counter and the only way to get tickets were through an Automated Ticketing Machine. The problem there being, that we did not have the required coins to be able to buy the tickets. As we stood there wondering what we would do, a family came and purchased their tickets with an ATM card. We requested them to get our tickets and that we would pay in cash. They very kindly agreed, and we were on our way.
We took the Slowtrein to Utrecht and from there the InterCity to Rotterdam.
The train journey to Rotterdam was out of a Hans Anderson fairy tale. There were cute farm houses, set in the middle of huge stretches of pastures. On the pastures were cows, sheep and ponies.
The first thing that hits you the moment you walk out of Rotterdam station is the clanging of the tram warnings, and they stay with you for the duration of your stay there. Every time the tram comes across you hear the clanging of the bells warning the pedestrians and cyclists.
From Rotterdam Central we followed the signs that led us to the tourist office, where we were told about what the city has to offer and provided maps to guide us along the way.
The first port of stop for us was the cube houses. They were approached through the city market. The cube houses are an architectural wonder. The houses are built us cubes and stand on an edge. To understand this take your matchbox and make it stand on one of its corners, and people actually live in those things.
From there we moved to the waterfront and walked though a most beautiful park until we reached the Euromast. The Euromast is a tall structure very much like the Eiffel Tower. We took an elevator three-quarter of the way up. Next we get into a circular elevator which takes us to the pinnacle. From there we got a bird’s eye view of the city.
There is a museum just across the road from the Euromast. But my feet were dead from walking. But that time we had walked almost six hours straight. We somehow made it back to Rotterdam Central and then took the train back home. Getting back home of course entailed walking over an hour from Putten station to Landal Heihaas. At the end of the walk we had just enough energy to drag ourselves into our respective beds and crash out.
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