clog blog: Wereldhavendagen

There was quite a lot happening this weekend in Rotterdam, there is a 10 day open air film festival at Museum Park and World Port Day at Rotterdam Port. And for a change the weather was really nice!

On Friday night we packed a picnic and took our fold-up chairs to Museum Park, not far from us for the Pleinbioscoop! We were expecting grass but found instead a concrete slab with a big screen at one end, lol. We arrived seriously early but enjoyed catching the last of the rays close to the canal. It soon became quite busy so we grabbed a spot and got cosy. But only a few minutes before the movie they asked everyone to please pick up their chairs and move forward 10 steps so that the late comers could find place at the back. What was the point of coming early to get a good spot then? Seriously. The Dutch are so good everyone got up and moved, no one in SA would have moved! But it caused a lot of chaos and when asked a second time less than half the people stood to move. And then a really tall latecomer decided to plonk his chair right in front of me! Fail. We asked him to move which he ignored and then the nice people sitting next to us asked him to move so he finally did with a lot of grumbling!

The movie was the 2010 western ‘True Grit’ with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Hailee Steinfeld. The movie was about lone bandit chaser Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) helping Mattie Ross (Steinfeld) to track down the murderer of her father (Brolin). It was a typical Western with lots of action which can get a bit grizzly at times but it was pretty good. If you thought Jeff Bridges was good as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart then watch this one, he is even better!

After a late night we had an early start and headed off to the World Port Day festivities! Wereldhavendagen is a weekend of celebrating the Port of Rotterdam with various activities and excursions planned and also entertainment in the evenings. There are about 100 different tours to choose from in Dutch but only 3 in English, lol. We joined a tour of the Euromax Container Terminal and boarded a bus at 9:30 am headed for the Maasvlaakte, close to where we had been before at the Maeslantkering.

Our guide had previously worked for the port and was a wealth of information, he did a really good job telling us about the history of the port and other facts n figures. The Port of Rotterdam is the largest European port, the fourth largest in the world and is one of the most important for Europe, especially Germany. The Euromax container terminal has been operational since 2008 and has 1500 m of Quay side. Extensions of the Maasvlakte are currently underway and when it is completed there will be 4 km of Quay side! The port currently handles 1.3 million containers a year which will increase to 3 million by 2030. Crazy! Shanghai is currently the world’s largest port and container terminal and handles an insane amount of containers each year.

The entire terminal is semi-automated and is operational 24 hours a day. When a ship arrives, people-operated cranes remove the containers and place them onto automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, which then automatically move them around to trucks or wherever they need to go. The AGVs are pre-programmed with where they need to go and also re-fuel automatically. The cranes are semi-automated in that they only need to be guided as to where exactly on the container to pick up it up and then everything else is pre-programmed. There is also a railway line, the Betuweroute, which is a dedicated 160 km freight line going from the container terminal directly to Germany. The building of the track was very controversial and cost 4.7 billion euro by the time construction was completed in 2007.

There were some demonstrations set up for the visitors including how the massive container-lifting cranes operate, how the cranes rotate to place/remove containers from/to trains/trucks and how trains change track after loading/unloading containers. The people were very friendly and we enjoyed the interactiveness of the tour. It really was an interesting tour and we thoroughly enjoyed it. We hope in future that they will increase the number of English tours available or that our Dutch will improve so we can join a Dutch tour!

Once back in the city we strolled around and soaked up the atmosphere. It was very busy and vibey on Saturday and hot and humid! We had lunch at the old harbour area near the market and where we stayed in February, it is actually the pub where Justin met his current cricket captain, lol. The pub next door had live music in the form of old sailor shanty choirs, was very cool!

We headed home and squeezed in a nap before heading back to the water’s edge near the Erasmus Bridge for evening’s entertainment. We had heard that there is always an amazing fireworks display at the end of the evening but didn’t care much for the rest of the line-up. There was a Chinese theme for World Port Day this year and a customary Chinese Dragon was placed on a huge ship on the River Maas. The dragon was 120 m long and colourfully lit up with many lights. The fireworks were set off from a platform on the same boat. The fireworks display lasted about 15 min and was really impressive! The display was roughly choreographed to music and included the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean, a Vanessa Mae track, the modern version of Over the Rainbow, Queen’s We Will Rock You and ended off with Katy Perry’s Firework, very clever choices.

In true Dutch style today is overcast and rainy after a few days of comparatively good weather. Although the last few days were nice and toasty, last week was mostly quite cold and the forecast for this week is looking cloudy, rainy and super windy! Joy.

Plans for this week include seeing our friends from Cape Town Evan and Kerryn Torrance (and their son Cameron!) on Wednesday night for dinner in Amsterdam. If you were at our wedding ceremony, Evan played guitar and Kerryn played the violin. Really looking forward to seeing them =)

In other news Bronwen’s TU Delft officially started on Thursday, woohoo! In my four month contract I get 13.6 days leave, almost as much as Justin used to get in SA for a whole year! Lol. And Justin is potentially starting a new project in Israel soon which will include some travelling. At least it is better than Luanda…

Happy Spring Day for Thursday to everyone in the Southern Hemisphere! Although our good friend Richard Lange will tell you that Spring only officially starts on 23 September with the equinox ‘~)

Till next time…