Finnishing up intro days in Rotterdam

The second intro day for me started early after a  massive storm rolled through the city, with winds reaching around 50/60mph. It was so windy my room was shaking, and this is on the second floor not even that high up. On top of the crazy winds the rains was even crazier, to call it sideway rain, would be an understatement. With all that said I had to be down to the canals for a pancake boat tour, which was the first event that ESN the group that was running the intro days was putting on. To say that going on this boat tour would best be described as a mistake, it made me very seasick, and wreck the day and the tour for me, although I did get a few good pictures.

This big boat was pretty cool for me to watch go by while trying to make sure that I could hold down the great pancakes 

Dutch Pancakes were amazing, they are very similar to crepes, and I had bacon put on as well. Considering I was not feeling very well, the pancakes were very good, and I enjoyed looking out of the window watching different things go by.

 not quite sure what the building above is but it looked cool outside of the window and I enjoyed how the spell America here.

 The Bridge above is the Erasmus Bridge and is the one of the defining things in the city. It is named after Desiderius Erasmus, the philosopher, humanist. He was born in Rotterdam but never really lived in Rotterdam, but the people in Rotterdam had claimed him as there own even though he lived in Paris and cities in Belgium for the majority of his life. He is also the name sake of my University, Erasmus University.

This bridge is called the Willemsbrug another bridge that we passed by on the tour, its a less known than the other bridges in the city, but I thought that I looked very cool. It was named after King Willem the III of the Netherlands.

A few more buildings that I saw on the tour as we went about. This will be the last part of the Pancake boat tour.

After the tour I went back to my room to recover from the sea sickness. I ended up missing the rest of the days events, most of which was canceled due to the storm.

So moving on to the next to the third and final day of the Intro days, we started off after lunch by doing a Dutch quiz. The quiz is pretty straight forward try to get as many answers as you can right in the fast time to get the most points (the quiz was on Kahoot). Somehow I was able to win the quiz against maybe 50 other people playing, obviously I won because I'm basically a genius not because I'm good at guessing and know too much random facts about the Netherlands. Because I won the quiz I actually won free tickets to the ESN trip to Antwerp and Bruges, so I'm looking forward to that trip which will be happening in March or April.

The next stop on the day was ice skating at the local speed skating track.



It was really fun as skating always is, except there was one problem and that was the skates. They were so dull it was like learning to skate all over again, I was actually afraid when I was skating that I would injury my knee, which never happens. Even with that issue that I had with the skates I still had tons of fun.

I became the chauffeur for a bunch people pushing them around on the thing that you are supposed to use for balance, instead we turned it into a chair.

 Those orange skates will forever be my enemy, it felt like they hadn't sharpened them in months, and I don't even really like sharp skates but they were just way to dull.

And that marks the end of anything of note for ESN intro days. Looking back on those three days, I had a ton of fun, and met some really cool people. Overall a successful endeavor and a great way to learn a bit about Dutch culture and things to do in Rotterdam. Next I'll be going into detail on my trip to the Hague.