One Awesome Week

My first week of class here in the Netherlands is completed, and what a week it has been. I know that I have ridden at least 100 miles on a bike around the area, and one of my classmates says even 150 miles would be a more accurate estimate. We've done so many cool things, I don't think I possibly can cover them all, but I'll give it a shot.

On Monday, our first day of the class, we went through a brief orientation where we had to sign forms and go over some rules of the road. We also touched on some history of the area and how most of the Netherlands is below sea level. To develop the land here, they needed to basically squeeze the water out of the peaty soil and then pump the water up into canals. To avoid flooding, there are plenty of areas for water to flow to and dikes to keep it contained. After the brief class period, we set out to adjust to bicycling around the Den Haag area, we checked out Ypenburg and Leidsenveen with a quick lunch in the town center of Nootdorp. The area is currently being expanded and we were able to see first hand how the Dutch organize their communities with bike facilities and commercial/residential building placement. For a good detailed write-up of the day, you can check out Brian's blog.

Green railway! Not a great area to play in though.

Notice the bike parking outnumbers the number of cars. It's crazy like that here!

Tuesday was the trip out to Pijnacker. I went into detail of that class in a previous post.

We started the Wednesday class off with a trip to the Calamity Water Storage. This area was farmland that, in case of heavy storms, could flood to make a temporary lake in order to protect the cities from flooding. From here, we visited Priva, a company that specialized in sustainable greenhouse design. The company building was even considered a carbon neutral building, using water in a well to cool and heat the building when needed. Another neat fact of the company building was that if the business ever closed, the company building could be changed into a senior living center without much effort. Talk about planning ahead. After Priva, we visited a greenhouse to see how the Dutch were able to grow plants and vegetables all year long. From there, we finished off our day by dipping our feet into the North Sea, which was not as cold as I expected (in fact, many of the Boston students went swimming).

Cars could only travel in the far left lane. The middle lane was reserved for freight (which traveled this road frequently) and the right lane was reserved for buses only.

Yes, this is a lot of flowers, and it wasn't even half. The pipes above the flowers are to pump water to heat or cool the greenhouse.

Those arent' birds in the distance, those are kite surfers.

A hedge-maze that was alongside the bike route home. Reminded several people of Harry Potter.

 On Thursday, the class took a train and visited Houten, which was explained as "Bicycle Heaven with Bicycle Heaven". The town was designed oriented around bike infrastructure. A "bike highway" existed in the center of town that stretched the entire east/west of the city. This highway was nice for its frequent parks or lakes where kids (or some adults) could have fun and play. The residential areas were segmented from each other, and each one was named after something that was reflected on all of the streets within. So if you were in the "Lake" area, all the streets would be named after lakes: "Crystal Lake", "Clear Lake", etc.. (simplified to English). Whereas the town may have been "heaven" for bikes, some of its planning didn't seem sustainable. For instance, an office area had absolutely no restaurant or coffee shop, so if someone was off on lunch, they had to travel (more than likely by car) to the city center to eat.

It was difficult to find a spot to park my bike.

Bike parking at the station in Houten. It was under the trains in a closed area.

Example of the street setup. This was the "Camp" section of the town.

This was at a bike roundabout. The cycle track traveled under the road in a circle.

Who says adults can't have fun on the playground. This was a zip-line that just needed to be tried out.

On the last day of the week we visited Maeslantkering gate which protects the city of Rotterdam from flooding if the ocean level rises. The gate is a huge marvel of engineering. When its computers detect a rise in the water of about 3 meters, it swings two gates closed to funnel the water, preventing the water downstream from rising. Each side of the gate is 237 meters long (about as long as the Eiffel Tower!) and 210 meters wide. After drooling over such a large structure that moves, we took a ferry to the other side and visited Futureland. This place is dedicated to the Maasvlakte 2 project, which is the €2.9 billion land expansion to the Port of Rotterdam (known as the warehouse of Europe). The Port of Rotterdam is one of the largest freight ports in the world, and the largest one in Europe. Since it is already packed to the ends, they are actually building new land (3 square miles in fact) to construct an expansion on.  For a good documentary on the project, check out Discovery Channel's show "Build it Bigger: Port of Rotterdam" in season 4. After getting an overview of the project, we actually got to take a quick tour the port by bus and observe the unloading of freight containers.

It is a picture of a picture, but the thing is too large to show in one shot from my camera.

Another picture of a picture, but it shows the gates close. When they close, the Port of Rotterdam closes for at least a day costing millions of dollars in lost work.

View of the gate on the other shore.

The gate is 22 meters tall. The canal is 17 meters deep. For those bad at math, it can protect up to a 5 meter rise in the ocean level.

Even the ferry had spots to park bikes!

Big container boat moored at the port.

Straddle crane moving a freight container off a truck.

We have one more tour coming up this next week to the city of Rotterdam. Hopefully I get all my homework done so I can attend the class. I'm due to return home this upcoming Thursday, and honestly I'm a bit reluctant to leave. It seems like there is so much more in the area that I simply don't have the time to observe.