Travel Log: Along the North Sea Coast

Another year, another Interrail tour. It's not a tradition yet, but it's my third use of this European rail program. The first time was last year, when me and a few other people I'd met in Paris went on a journey through a bunch of European cities in just a few days. This year, my brother and I went on a week-long vacation on a pretty similar route.

Since last year, my travel kilometres have really ramped up. I have lost count of how many places I've been to and how many hours I've spent on trains, honestly. This is likely going to continue, as I plan on travelling even more in the future on my quest to find my next place of residence and work/studies. You know, figuring things out™.

I'm trying something new with this post: logging and talking about (a selection of) my travels. Inspiration for this comes from Emily Gorcenski's Travelogue. I haven't settled on a format yet and I don't know if this is going to be a regular thing. Bear with me, we'll see how this goes.

Bruges

Our first stop was Bruges (Brugge), the capital of West Flanders in Belgium. But don't let the word capital fool you, the city is pretty damn small. It is a medieval city with really beautiful streets and houses, and a long history as a European port.

The train ride there was quite a long one. My brother came from Berlin (in the north), I came from Karlsruhe (in the south), so we met up in Cologne (somewhere in the middle) to then cross the border to Belgium together. It was a long day of train rides, especially for my brother who had to deal with a 2 hour delay on his trip. But we made it in time for check-in at our hotel.

On our day of arrival, we went to eat something at a pretty obvious tourist trap restaurant on the Market Square and spent the rest of the evening sampling a bunch of Belgian beers in a small bar where a handful of locals had gathered to watch their club play football.

The second and "proper" day in Bruges was pretty relaxed. We started it off with a boat tour through the canals, which is definitely something I would recommend to everyone who visits. Our guide switched between English, Dutch, and French rapidly and seamlessly, which was pretty impressive.

We took some walks, visited the old and impressive Basilica of the Holy Blood and the city hall museum. In the latter, I particularly enjoyed the wall paintings in the big Gothic hall, which were fairly new and also hadn't been created using the typical Italian fresco techniques, so they looked quite different from those found in many other old European buildings.

After snacks (loaded fries and sandwiches) and a bit of rest in the Astridpark, we went to The Old Chocolate House, a chocolate shop with an adjacent tearoom (serving hot chocolate, of course). As is often the case when I visit places like these, I look for the most obscure thing to try. In this case, I bought ginger chocolates (not horrible, but not very pleasant either) and drank a hot chocolate made of very dark chocolate, cinnamon and chili (interesting in a not-bad way, though I'm not sure I would order it again).

In the evening we had some tapas and hung out in another bar, this time in the quieter St. Anna quarter in the east. The bar belongs to a hostel and was bustling with young people from all around. We met a nice chap from Northern Ireland and had a good time.

Overall, Bruges was laid-back and nice to look at. Very enjoyable, though rather tourist-heavy (in relation to the city's size) and expensive. Also, I was surprised at the ubiquity of cars – I would have expected this to be the kind of city that has a car-free centre.

The Hague

On Sunday, we continued on to The Hague (Den Haag) in the Netherlands. The trip there was a bit more adventurous, involving, in theory, 4 different IC trains. Unfortunately, our last connection from Rotterdam to The Hague was cancelled, as were all other trains between the two cities. Luckily, they are close enough to each other that there runs a metro line on separate set of rails between them. Unfortunately, we had to pay extra to take it, but at least we made it.

We were exhausted after we arrived, so we only really dragged ourselves to go out for dinner, which we found in the city's Chinatown. We ended up at the frequently recommended Little V, and had way too much food thanks to the staff bringing us the orders of other tables by mistake. The "surprise menu" we had was a bog-standard mix of Westernised nondescript Asian food – not particularly overwhelming. I suppose I have yet to find another European city that comes close to Paris in terms of consistently good Vietnamese food.

On day 1 in The Hague, I set out to walk around, look at stuff™, and visit a museum or two. I was especially looking forward to the Escher museum. Unfortunately, I realised that a lot of stuff is closed on Mondays in The Hague, including almost all major museums. The Mauritshuis, probably best known for being the home of the Girl with a Pearl Earring, was an exception and so I visited. The museum was nice and compact, and I did enjoy a number of paintings there, though in general I must admit the Dutch Golden Age just doesn't really do it for me. We spent the rest of the day at the nearby beach of Scheveningen, which was very wide and clean. The weather was perfect, the sea just the right temperature for cooling off, all in all a great success.

For the next day, we had planned to cycle approximately 25 km to the neighbouring city of Rotterdam as a day trip. Through a travel guide, I found a small bike rental service that really doesn't advertise itself as such from the outside; it's primarily a cosy little bookshop and café. We rented two bicycles that felt like they were on the verge of falling apart, and with their single gear and lack of a hand-controlled brakes, they were clearly not intended for travelling longer distances – they were what the Dutch lovingly call "omafietsen" (granny bikes). But they only cost us 25€ and we figured Dutch cycling infrastructure would be able to compensate for their shortcomings.

Under a scorching sun, we made our way to Rotterdam without issues, except occasionally being confused about which paths to use. We hung out in a park, had lunch, cycled over the Erasmus bridge with an impressive view of the city's skyscraper skyline (and got nearly killed a couple of times), and finally visited the National Museum of Photography. That one was really good, highly recommend it if you're ever in Rotterdam. Since the timing for cycling back in time for returning the bikes was getting uncomfortably narrow and we didn't feel a particular want to cycle back, we took the train back instead (lazy, I know).

Before departing to Amsterdam on Wednesday, we decided to still go to the Escher museum. And that turned out to be a great idea! I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot about Escher and his work. Some things I picked up:

• Escher created every single print by hand using an old Japanese printing technique
• he was obsessed with small Italian villages
  • honestly, same (Hitman's fictional, but reality-inspired Sapienza started it for me)
  • among them: Atrani. It's featured in Escher's most famous work, Metamorphosis, and also incidentally in the recent, excellent Netflix show Ripley
  • Escher's earlier works were pretty much all "normal" depictions of those villages!
• for his amazing surreal, paradoxical and impossible scenes, he used mathematical intuition (!!!)
  • this kind of blew me away. There were stories of how mathematicians took years to figure out the geometrical theory behind Escher's work, but he didn't understand it himself!
  • it also reminded me of the recent breakthrough in the field of tessellation, where a non-mathematician figured out a maths problem simply by experimenting with shapes (Escher also did amazing work in this field!)

Definitely visit that museum if you enjoy Escher at all. Also they have cool souvenirs. Anyway, nerd-ramblings over.

Amsterdam

On Wednesday, we made our way to Amsterdam, a trivial journey of 50 minutes. After checking in to the hotel, we took a walk through nearby Vondelpark and then had early dinner at a popular Indonesian place called Warna Baru. This was a first, since I don't think I've ever eaten at an explicitly Indonesian restaurant before. Good cuisine.

On day 1, we got up really early, because my brother wanted to go to a flea market early in the morning.

Walking through the red light district was rather depressing. It was completely trashed from the night before, and residents were patiently cleaning up the mess. And while seeing all the brothels, erotic shops and drugs wasn't shocking to me (practically every major German city has areas like this), I still felt rather uncomfortable walking through this part of Amsterdam. From what I've heard, locals hate the area for the tourists alone, and I totally get it. We did our best to avoid it for the rest of our stay.

While my brother was off to buying clothes, I had great coffee and pastry at the really nice café Latei and then went to the botanical garden. If you like plants: go there. If you have no idea about plants, like me: still go there. The garden houses many different kinds of cool plants, presented in interesting ways, and with information that everyone can understand. I went through a tropical greenhouse full of butterflies, a forest area, a swamp and dune area, an arrangement showing the relations between different species, and a display of various carnivorous plants and how they catch their prey. Unfortunately, one rather big area of the garden was closed off for renovation. Still, I spent a lot of time there and it was fun!

After meeting up again, we had a somewhat late lunch at Bar Bukowski, and the pulled chicken burger I had there was possibly the best meal of the entire trip. Towards the evening, we headed to the NEMO Science Museum, but not for the museum part of it. Throughout the month of August, Amsterdam hosts many pride-themed events. On that Thursday evening, there was a free karaoke show on top of the science museum's roof hosted by 2 Drag Queens which ended up being pretty fun (although I grew tired of the typical karaoke songs rather quickly).

On the day of our departure, we did a canal tour (which we'd missed the previous days), had some more food, and then went back to our family in Berlin by direct IC train without any complications.

Conclusion

I don't really know how to end this post, so I'll leave you with this: travelling to other places by train is fun! If you are fortunate enough to live somewhere with a decent rail system, take some time at some point to get an overview of what routes are possible for you. Where can you even go by train? Maybe you'll find that this is inspiration for spending a weekend somewhere else. For example, I found out that there is a direct sleeper train between Karlsruhe and Utrecht, so now I'm considering returning to the Netherlands for a weekend some time later this year.

Interrail has its problems. It's not quite as convenient as advertised, and there are a couple hoops to jump through, especially regarding seat reservations and train company support. But if you use it the right way, it quickly becomes worth it and gives you an amazing sense of travel freedom.