{"id":370,"date":"2016-06-22T18:20:22","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T22:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/?p=370"},"modified":"2016-08-07T01:57:51","modified_gmt":"2016-08-07T05:57:51","slug":"june-19-an-eventful-day-in-south-holland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/2016\/06\/22\/june-19-an-eventful-day-in-south-holland\/","title":{"rendered":"June 19: An Eventful Day in South Holland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday, June 19, was the best weather day we had while visiting in Rotterdam. It was also a busy day. We started out by driving to Rotterdam Centraal, the main railway station, so we could park for our first adventure, climbing a giant staircase up the side of a building. I just had to stop and take a picture of the commuter bikes. There is nothing quite so Dutch. The question is: How do you ever find your own?<\/p>\n

\"Dutch
Dutch Commuter Bicycles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I had no idea what to expect when the staircase up the side of an office building was described to me. It was installed as part of a celebration of the city of Rotterdam, and June 19 was the last day before being torn down, so we couldn\u2019t miss it.<\/p>\n

The building it climbs is called the Groot Handels Gebouw, which means\u00a0\u201cBig Business Building\u201d, or something like that. The building, one of the first ones built after World War II,\u00a0helped bring post-war prosperity to the city after the center of Rotterdam was demolished by the Germans.<\/p>\n

The wooden and steel staircase was\u00a0eight\u00a0stories tall, and everyone in Rotterdam wanted to climb it before it was gone. We got there just at 10:00 AM when it opened, and the crowds gathered quickly. \u00a0Pretty soon, the staircase was filled with mobs of people happily climbing up and down.<\/p>\n

\"Groot
Groot Handels Gebouw Staircase<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The rooftop offered grand views of the city in every direction, with\u00a0commemorative plaques about Rotterdam\u2019s history \u00a0installed around the perimeter. At the end of the loop was a film that celebrated Rotterdam from its rebuilding in the Forties up to the present day. I hope I got the gist, even though it was entirely in Dutch.<\/p>\n

\"View
View from the Groot Handels Gebouw<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After leaving Rotterdam, we drove to visit Arjan\u2019s friend Koos and his girlfriend, Yuk Ying, in Leiden. Koos is a Sinologist (translator and expert in Chinese) and\u00a0has just successfully defended his dissertation and received his Ph.D. His dissertation concerns early Dutch translators of Chinese working in the Dutch East Indies. It is written in English, and I once helped to edit one of his chapters.<\/p>\n

Koos obtained tickets for us to visit the German bunkers at the\u00a0Atlantic Wall Museum at Noordwijk, on the North Sea. The museum consists of one command post and one gun bunker. The Germans built a system of such defenses along the entire coastline of France, Belgium, and Holland\u00a0to prevent\u00a0attacks by sea, most of which never came.<\/p>\n

\"German
German Bunkers at Noordwijk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To view the museum, we joined a group with a guide and walked through the dark, cool, underground tunnels, with just enough light to see. It is frightening to see the tremendous effort the Germans expended to create\u00a0the tunnels and build the gun bunkers. It took concentration not to get claustrophobic.<\/p>\n

A team of 12 men was assigned to each gun, and they manned the guns in shifts 24\/7.\u00a0There were underground barracks and toilets and showers, and even a \u201cswimming pool\u201d. It must have been\u00a0truly\u00a0depressing to live below ground in these rat warrens. Today, they warned us that there are bats living there, but\u00a0we didn\u2019t see any.<\/p>\n

The command post, where the officers lived, contains most of the museum information. The officers had bunk beds and much more room than the enlisted men below. \u00a0One\u00a0frightening detail in the museum was seeing a\u00a0film of Dutch workers doing the work of building the bunkers and pouring the three meters of concrete for the walls and ceilings.<\/p>\n

To finish the day, the four of us walked on the beach and across the dunes through a bird sanctuary, listening for nightingales. After that we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant along the seaside in Noordwijk before driving back to Leiden and then Rotterdam.<\/p>\n

\"Yuk
Yuk Ying, Koos, and Arjan on the Beach at Noordwijk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Photographs \u00a9 2016 P.J. Gardner<\/a>. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday, June 19, was the best weather day we had while visiting in Rotterdam. It was also a busy day. We started out by driving to Rotterdam Centraal, the main railway station, so we could park for our first adventure, climbing a giant staircase up the side of a building. I just had to stop … Continue reading “June 19: An Eventful Day in South Holland”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":545,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}