My 7 euro bus took around two hours from Brussels to Rotterdam. After dropping off my stuff at the hostel, which made extremely strong first impressions (a kitchen, at last!), I looked at sights in the area and realized there were none that sounded very interesting, so I decided to check out the Hague. The only thing I knew about The Hague is that it has the ICJ and ICC, though I had no idea what was actually there. It was more of a lead than I had for Rotterdam, though, so i hopped on the commuter rail that connects them and was there in roughly half an hour. The two cities are almost one; really the only thing separating them is a small band of farmland that feels somewhat out of place. Rotterdam is a fairly large city, as I'd known, but The Hague actually feels like it may be larger still, which I hadn't expected at all. Wikipedia tells me that Rotterdam is slightly larger by population, but it doesn't really look that way based on the skyline. Not really knowing what to actually do, I started wandering aimlessly. I came across the Dutch equivalent of the US Capitol Building and White House rolled into one, which really seems like it should be in Amsterdam. It's an ancient and very attractive building that's currently under major renovations. As such, the city has erected a tower to look out over it and this was a great way to look out at the city. A strange haze seems to be ever present around Dutch cities, though there's no smell of smog. From here I wandered in the direction of the ICJ, which is actually very impressive. A couple asked me to take their picture in front of it and I'm not clear they understood what goes on there. I kept walking generally north until I got close to the beach, which features a huge pier reminiscent of Santa Monica. While the Hague has no subway, it does have an extremely extensive network of trams, and these extended all the way out this beachfront section of the city, so I got on and was back in Rotterdam in time to do some grocery shopping.

Buying groceries in a different language is harder than I'd expected. There are so many words on most products, and not knowing what most of them mean makes everything very challenging. In Brussels I could usually figure out what the French on packaging meant, but my Dutch is completely nonexistent and so I was often totally lost. I also discovered that Grocery Store Music is not an exclusively American phenomenon, since they were playing exactly the same inoffensive, bland, and artificially cheery style of music I've come to expect from the local Market Basket or Shaws (except in Dutch).

When I got back to the hostel I meant to cook some dinner, but then it turned out that it was actually Free Dinner Thursday, where the hostel staff cook for everyone for free. This hostel is easily the best I've stayed at since coming to Europe, possibly rivaled only by the dearly departed Paradiso that used to be in Nelson, NZ. The common areas were great, the events scheduling was excellent, they had an extremely cute cat, and there was a lovable eco-hippie vibe to the whole property. They made some eggplant pasta which was pretty good and I got to socialize with a bunch of other guests. I talked most extensively with a Czech student, a guy from Ecuador, and a woman around my age from southeastern France. She detailed a plan to sail across the Atlantic this winter, which sounds completely miserable (it apparently takes 3 weeks), but also incredibly cool. After dinner I went out with her and we explored downtown Rotterdam for a while. Predictably, it's not that exciting. It's clean and seems to be a decent place to live, but there really isn't a whole lot of uniqueness or character. They seem to want to remind everyone that they're the largest port in Europe; the whole waterfront is covered in machinery that presumably used to be functional before they shifted port operations further outside the city. I won't tell you not to visit Rotterdam, since I had a great time, but unless you have months off work I probably wouldn't prioritize it. The Hague is more interesting, I think.