Rotterdam Travel to the Future Walking Tour

Just wanted to thank the host, because the tour was really awesome, we've seen many places, the public ones and some hidden gems as well. Those nice views we also covered by fascinating stories!

Confusion... no, more powerful... loss, confusion. It's a strangely overwhelming feeling not to recognize the city you've lived in for over twenty years. Had I not gone on this excursion offered by Snurk.Travel / Your own Holland six years ago, my husband and I would have shown classic city symbols to relatives and friends visiting Rotterdam: The Town Hall (Stadhuis), the modernist 45° Cube Houses (Kubuswoningen), the Indoor Market (Markthal), the Central Library similar to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the House-Sharpened Pencil (Potloodhuis), the first skyscraper in Europe, the White House (Withuis), the Port of Rotterdam. All these attractions our guide Danja (Hochlovic) will show us too. And easily and interestingly, without overloading with dates, will tell about them. He'll tell me as if he was born in Rotterdam and spent his whole life studying and admiring the city. Involuntarily, you'll look at the building dozens of times over. The group gathered at Grand Central Station. Logically, we started with this unusual building that resembles a space art object. Someone's got a bright shark mouth. In memory of the old station – station clock, and the letters folding into the “Central station” on the facade. The roof of the station above the tracks is equipped with 130,000 solar panels. Expected to head straight to the extraordinary houses of Rotterdam, which tourists from all over the world are eager to see. Let's say the Cube Houses or the Cactus House, made of rounded petal plates, each topped by a glazed loggia or wave-shaped balcony with a swimming pool and hanging gardens. But Dania led us in a completely different direction. In my sense, to the "backyards" of the city. When I came to the Netherlands in the early nineties to visit my Dutch husband, he strictly forbade me to walk alone in that direction. There was the then infamous Perron Zero in the parking lot next to the station, where hundreds, maybe thousands, of addicts from almost all over the world gathered from 1987 to the end of 1994 to get free methadone and clean syringes. With this “magnet”, invented by Pastor Hans Visser out of compassion for these unfortunates, the city centre was free of drug addicts. I had no desire to walk in that neighborhood. At the time, we lived in Nieuwekerk aan den IJssel, a well-fed bourgeois town near Rotterdam in which the inhabitants washed their windows every week and kept their curtains up: "nothing that looks through the windows and sees us, but we will also look at them." Rotterdam, especially in the evenings, had a grim impression: deserted windy grey streets, with passers-by occasionally running into the distance. It seemed like you were in a ghost town that gave rise to vaguely disturbing anxiety. So, following Daniel's composition of the excursion, we headed to a part of the city I had imagined to be neglected. Bypassed the office buildings and ... set foot on a bright sunny yellow street carpet. On the right is a red car smashing through the wall – a symbol that breaks the dead wall between a rich and poor neighborhood. We pass through the arch and end up on the patio. On the walls of the surrounding buildings? No. When you look at the graffiti you don't understand what's being depicted. On them, the street “artist” is most likely trying to immortalize his name or that of his beloved. And here are more or less intelligible pictures with a powerful message. Which one? Danya tells us about it. My first street art knowledge. It'll be a while and I'll have Dana give us a street art tour of all of Rotterdam. During the tour, I will constantly wonder in my mind: “How come? I walked through it a hundred times, ran through it, and just glanced at the paintings on the walls without thinking. And there's a whole history of Rotterdam! Everybody hurry, hurry...” On the opposite side of the patio, the bright yellow that goes into the sky is almost blinding. Climb the sunny steps to the high bridge of rough De Luchtsingel wood. I was wondering how to translate. Literally, it's "Air Belt," but I also like Google's translation of "Air Girth." This 390-metre long wooden footbridge has connected the centre and north of Rotterdam since 2014: Schieblok is a building housing the studios of architects, designers and other creative people - with Hofbogen, which for a century ran trains between Rotterdam and the seaside resort of Scheveningen. Now in the arches under the old railway viaduct stretch 2 kilometers quaint boutiques and designer shops, fancy restaurants, bars and cafes with sun-drenched summer terraces. And on the bridge itself, you can take the elevator to the sixth floor and walk to the seventh, where the DakAkker is located on the roof of the Schieblock and overlooks the main street of Rotterdam with the Town Hall. DakAkker is the largest open-air farm of 1000 m2 in the Netherlands and one of the largest in Europe, growing vegetables, edible flowers and fruits, and keeping bees. Immediately in the pavilion is a bistro where you can enjoy delicious biological food decorated with edible flowers and drink a shot of wine or marvelous coffee. When we were there with our Daniel, it was called Op Het Dak Bistro. Unfortunately, it failed the crown and moved to Ted's Place with a slightly different concept. But it's still cozy and delicious enough. DakAkker, by the way, is open for public events such as harvest festivals, lunches and seminars. We can get married here, too. The bridge, an initiative of the Rotterdam architectural firm ZUS, supported in 2011 by the city municipality, was financed largely by Rotterdam residents themselves through a crowdfunding campaign. De Luchtsingel and Hofbogen became symbols of the Rotterdam revival. According to the Lonely Planet guidebook, Rotterdam is now one of the “five best cities in the world,” and CNN even talked about “Dubai in the Polders.” In a word, the bridge breathed in, "enveloped the air" in a forgotten part of the city that for years had been at the mercy of emptiness and neglect. Rotterdam rallied, united. Today, my city impresses not only tourists, but also the residents themselves with modern architecture, fine cuisine and vibrant cultural life. In 2015, the Academy of Urbanism named Rotterdam a "laboratory of European architecture" and recognized Rotterdam as the best European city in the Urbanism Awards. Rotterdam is worth coming to see what the cities of the future will be like: ride driverless buses, see floating pavilions and gardens on the water, live in solar-heated houses, walk on the green roofs of buildings open to the public, admire sheep grazing peacefully on the slopes next to the motorway. And our tour guide Danja showed me "Bridge to the Future", about which in hustle and hassle she knew nothing. Thank him very much. Now I take my guests (to my chagrin my husband was gone three years ago) to this part of Rotterdam and always talk about Dana, our unique, unusually erudite tour guide, in love with Rotterdam.