Since June the 7th through June the 12th we have spent our time in a wonderful trip to the Nederlands. We visited Amsterdam, a lovely and exciting place, full of culture, fun, transgression and bicycles. It was crazy for me to discover that there is a place in the world where bicycles dominate over cars…
Then we moved to Utrecht,
to meet our friend Mattia who is living there until next october. Although smaller, Utrecht is in some way similar to Amsterdam, with a lot of canals, historic buildings and nice place where to find good food and beer (we had a huge and wonderful dinner at “Mikonos”, a Greek restaurant). People too is very lovely.
At the end we moved to Rotterdam, a completely different city, full of “original” architecture but poor of history because of World War II bombing.
However we found in Delfhaven (a neighborhood in the south west side of the city) a wonderful place where to spend the evening and to find extraordinary restaurants. In particular we suggest the libanese restaurant “Da Parel” and the Tapas Restaurant “Abrikoos”, two lovely places where we found great mediterranean food.
We spent also some time around Rotterdam (in the Nederlands is quite easy to move around, although without a car). So we went by bus to Kinderdjik, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In Kinderdjik there are 19 beatiful windmills and it is one of the most suggestive sites we have ever visited.
The day after we went by train (trains in the Nederlands work perfectly, not like in Italy) to Delft, the Vermeer town.
This site is lovely, full of history and very quiet and relaxing. It is famous in the world for the hand painted blue and white ceramics; they are very nice, but very expensive too.
This travel has been quite cheap. We found a good flight with Easyjet, a low cost airline company flying from Malpensa (Terminal 2) to Amsterdam Schipol airport. It is sad for italians to make a comparison between the two airports. One, the italian one, is small, not easily connected with the city and in general poor of courtesy and informations. The other one (Schipol) is beatiful, full of shops and information with a very fast connection, by train, with the center of Amsterdam.