Europe Backpacking - Netherlands again! (Part 1)

Hello people,

How's everyone today? How do you feel like during this pandemic time? It's been almost 2 months and I hope everyone is keeping their sanity alive.

Before this pandemic happened, I had a chance to visit the Netherlands to meet the dude. Well you know who. As crazy as it seems, I made an impulse decision to meet him. So here's what I did for two weeks there.

Among all the bad decisions that I made while traveling, this is the worse travel time that I chose. My flight schedule was so insane that made me realize that saving few hundreds is not worth it. So please people, do not make the same mistake that I did.

February 23-24. Flight from Kuala Lumpur - Abu Dhabi - Amsterdam
After arriving to Amsterdam, I took a train to Delft (cos that's where the dude lives). The train is around an hour long so I had time to rest.

February 25. We travel to Den Haag
Because both of us are suckers for museums, our first place to visit is the Mauritshuis museum. This museum display many spectacular paintings from Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and more. I bet you can recognize few paintings.

This is the famous painting of the girl with pearl earring. This is one of Vermeer famous painting. Fun fact, Vermeer is a dutch! What makes this painting famous is that the subject is an imaginary figure. In this case, the girl is wearing exotic dress, wearing oriental turban, and an improbably large pearl earrings. This style does not fit the era when Vermeer was painting it.







If you ever watch the Goldfinch movie, the movie was inspired by this painting. This is the painting by Carel Fabritius dated 1654. What makes the painting famous is the way that Fabritius portray the bird so lifelike, endowing this modest subject with his skills and talents.
Honestly, this become my favorite painting now. And I even got a postcard with this painting on!

While we were there, there's this extra exhibition of George Stubbs. He basically studied about the anatomy of horses and painted them. You know that during this time, people are proud of their horses. It's like a sign of wealth and power. Stubbs did an excellent work in painting horses and his most achievable painting is this horse named Whistlejacket. If you had the chance to visit this museum, look for this painting cos it's a very huge canvas and the horse is life-size. You really feels like the horse right next to you!

February 26: We travel to Rotterdam!

Here's the highlight of our trip. We're going to Kinderdijk! To go to this place, we need to go to Rotterdam and take water buses from here. Water bus is just like ferry. 

Kinderdijk is one of the places that I do not mind going again. The journey to this place is insane but totally worth it. We need to take 2 water buses to reach here. We chose the wrong season to visit this place because the wind is just crazy and makes it unbearable. I was wearing a very thick jacket and still is cold. Rains + Wind is no joke guys, I almost froze on the water ferry. 

Kinderdijk is one of UNESCO heritage city, it places a lot of traditional windmills and the view is just breathtaking. We managed to walk around along the wind and took nice pictures. When we're done, it's time for more water buses to go back to Rotterdam. 

Once in Rotterdam, we walked around the city. Compare to other places in Netherland, Rotterdam is quite a modern city. All the buildings are aesthetic and modern architecture which is nice. You'll find colorful and weird buildings here. Here's one of them.

After the walking, we feel hungry. So what's better place to go in Rotterdam than Market Hall! 

When we reached here, I was glad to be indoor at last. Here, you'll find all sort of foods from street food to international cuisine. We got our meals and now for snacks. So we treat ourselves with fresh stroopwafel and poffertjes. Poffertjes is like mini pancakes serves with powdery sugar and stroopwafel is cinnamon thin wafel. Delish! 

I think that's it for today, there's more places we went so wait for Part 2!