What more glamorous event could there be than 3 nights in February in grey rainy Rotterdam?
It was at least made much more thrilling due to Janine & I having two sets of tickets for the ATP tennis, held at the Ahoy (so Dutch..) stadium.
And we certainly walked round most of the city it felt, by the time we’d been to the Ahoy twice on the – very good – Dutch metro system, wandered round the shops, checked out some culture and chosen where to eat each day from the seemingly hundreds of mostly Asian restaurants!
We wisely added in a side trip to Den Haag, mostly so Janine could see ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Vermeer, in the Mauritshuis museum. Plus a few Rembrandts and other top pix while we were there. It was mercifully bijou compared to some art museums so we were back out in the drizzle before we knew it.
Thetennis itself was slightly lacking in the big names – Draper, Alcaraz etc having dropped out the week before – but we did at least get several good Dutchies such as Ballon Griekspoor (rousing the home crowd) and Auger-Aliassime, Halys etc who can knock the little green balls around pretty well. Janine even agreed to have her photo taken with the mascot as a thank to me for coming along.. tee hee.
Apart from that, our time was spent admiring the general Dutch building architecture, having my first bitterballen since my uncle’s funeral (many years ago now, but where I think I ate about 50 as we had over-catered and I couldn’t speak Dutch well enough to mingle easily) and managing to find a couple of half decent cocktail bars, we were also mesmerised by the ‘eclectic’ (slash bizarre/weird/hideous!) range of sculptures that popped up everywhere. My favourite by far being ‘Troll with a Large Dildo’ here below..
Anyway – despite it being grey and very February, it was still a good little trip away – and J is now the proud owner of a fancy new watch that she finally got off the pot and bought while we were there! I went slightly less snazzy and came back with 2 pairs of blue trousers (breaking the fashion mould as ever) and a new top. Plus a rather nice squooshy blue-y cuddly dinosaur theoretically bought for my smallest great nephew, but which I suspect I will find it hard to hand over… Welcome to the household, little Knuffel. x