Rotten Weather Rotterdam

Day 132
I was up early for my train. I was ready to leave Belgium. This was kinda sad though, I really enjoyed every where I went except for Brussels. Perhaps I should have started there and ended in Bruges. There is no way you can not love Bruges.

It was cloudy out when I got off the train in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. About half way to my hostel someone turned on a switch and it started to pour. It would do this for the rest of the day. Rotterdam does have a lot of things to do, but none of them are really all that exciting. In light of the terrible weather, it being a Monday and everything, and really, there wasn´t anything to do, I decided to see a movie. The next movie up was Mama Mia, so I went with that. I really liked it, but what a travel nightmare!

My hostel had a rather long lock out period and I still had about 1.5 hours to kill when the movie ended. I went to a sushi place and read Bill Bryson over some california rolls.

When I could finally go to my bed I was really shocked at the hostel demographics. There seemed to be a large Esperanto conference going on. In case you don´t know what Esperanto is, it is a language created by a Polish guy about 100 years ago that was mean to be neutral as it was not associated with any country and to be easy for everyone to learn. As far as I knew it never took off and no one spoke it. Running into this conference was odd. What was even odder was that most of the people attending the conference were over 110 years old. I´m not kidding. Most of the time in hostels I´m about the oldest person there. Here I was just about the youngest.

I quickly managed to meet the only other two people under 110 who were not there for the conference. They were both Brits. Richard was visiting his sister who lived in Holland and was traveling the country a bit. Sam was a long termer like me. He is traveling rtw on a motorcycle for 4 years. Unfortunately he had an accident a few weeks ago in Switzerland and broke his leg. After a week in the hospitable and surgery he was hobbling around on crutches and just waiting to heal. If your interested his blog can be found at www.toukakoukan.co.uk.

As Sam was explaining to Richard what Esperanto was we were both sorta making fun of it. They didn´t over hear me, but they heard Sam. We got called out on it. Total foot in mouth moment. The three of us got along pretty well and we ended up chatting for the rest of the night and making plans to visit The Hague together the next day. I called it a pretty early night and the boys stayed up talking later.