025 - thu 25/05/2006 - den haag/rotterdam

the plan for today was to make our way to rotterdam, making a couple of stops along the way. but when we woke in the morning, we chatted with the hotel owner over breakfast and he informed us that today was a public holiday - ascension day - and that many things would be closed. at the train station we found out that the first stop on our itinerary for the day - the keukenhoff gardens - were closed.

so we headed straight for den haag, or the hague, the capital of the netherlands. we spent a few hours wandering through town, although the shops were mostly closed and the streets were vacant. actually i thought it was kind of funny that the streets were so empty on a public holiday, given that everyone had the day off, but i guess they had better places to be. luckily the escher museum was not closed, so we spent an hour or so wandering around marvelling at his weird and crazily impressive (and impossible) sketches.

after more of a wander, and the obligatory coffee stop, we got back on the train at made it to rotterdam. it was raining again. we found a tourist information centre that was a little bit out of the way, where we found an incredibly helpful and friendly dutch woman who found us some accommodation at another very modest (ie budget) hotel.

for dinner we found a caribbean bar that did lots of cocktails, so we ordered a couple of exotic sounding things and also a handful of dishes from their tapas menu. only it turned out that they were all deep fried, turning what sounded like a varied bunch of different dishes into a pretty bland smorgasbord of deep fried nothing. we spent the remaining daylight hours doing a self-guided tour of rotterdam using a map we'd picked up at the info centre. with suz as my guide, we found such amazing sights as the rotterdam hall of fame - very much like the one in hollywood except for the calibre of stars who were honored. lionel richie. kamahl! golden earring. toto. and these were just the ones that i recognised. bryan adams. the thing that got me about toto was that it wasn't signed "toto, 1984" which might have made sense. rather it was "toto, 2002". "bryan adams, 2005". only stars on the decline allowed on this walk of fame.

it got dark, we went back to the hotel and slept.

click here to see photos from this day