Rotterdam is more like Dubai

I do like a good blog post title. Although I actually can’t claim this one to be one of my own. It’s stolen from a page on the travel section of the BBC website. The first line of the article is “Rotterdam is like Disneyland for architecture geeks”.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171219-the-dutch-city-thats-more-like-dubai

Last month I walked round Rotterdam with a few friends. Our guide on this tour was another friend, and someone who has lived his entire life in the city and has a history and arts related background and so was able to provide plenty of contextual background to the city sights we were exploring.

The residents of Rotterdam are proud of their city, and our ‘tour guide’ was day is no exception. There is a lot to see, as the BBC article explains, the city has quite literally, risen from the ashes of the war time destruction of the 1940s. Like in other cities, many of the buildings have been given names by the locals. We saw the Swan, the Pencil, the Whistling Kettle and others.

The combinations of the new and the old is often quite breath-taking but makes the view from street level all the more interesting. I’ve not actually been to Dubai, so it’s difficult to comment on the comparison of the Dutch modern architecture capital with that particular city. Although the cold winter winds that sometimes are channelled between the architecture of Rotterdam probably do give an experience somewhat different to the climate in Dubai!

The BBC article ends:

“Rotterdam is like Disneyland for architecture geeks. But it may be even more fun for the rest of us, who don’t usually pay attention to the buildings we work, play and live in, and who’ll go home and wonder why our cities can’t be a little more like Rotterdam”.

A sentiment I can certainly relate to.

The things they didn’t mention during teacher training – no.21, the long range school trip

I wrote this a few weeks ago, but in the chaos and confusion of the week that followed I forgot to post it.

I did my training to be a teacher quite a while back. I enjoyed it and learnt a whole load of useful things that I still make use of and a few completely useless things. I can remember a lot of the workshops, presentations, seminars, reports and exams like they were yesterday. What I also realize now is that there are many things that feature in education that never got a mention and yet are, in terms of my own perception of things, pretty big issues one way or another.

I’m about to embark on a five day school trip. I know that the week ahead will feature a few such experiences. Let me start with the traveling in the bus experience.

We are traveling with about 115 pupils, aged 11-13. We are setting off at 6.30 in the morning, we’ll be reaching our destination at about 7 in the evening. We’re going to be traveling in two buses starting our journey in the central Netherlands and finishing near Swindon in England. The day also involves an hour and a half on a ferry to cross the channel. Oh yes, we are traveling with a group of nine staff members.

None of the children involved are likely to have made such a trip before, and to say that they are excited, nervous and just generally wound up about it is something of an understatement! Keeping a lid on the excitement is kind of the order of the day. No energy drinks, only limited sweets during the course of the day and hopefully it will remain bearable for all.

Three hours into the journey and I’m no longer sitting next to one of my colleagues, I’m now sitting next to a particularly irritating voice in the bus, half way down the bus amongst the boys to apply a calming influence…..it works up to a point, but it does kind of take the experience of arguing children in the back of the car on a long drive to a whole new level. Only another nine hours to go before we reach our destination.

Ahead is a week of sleep deprivation. Calming 115 children down and getting them to go to sleep at the end of the day isn’t for the faint hearted! Shepherding them as a group through the Oxford town centre in the early evening rush hour isn’t either really. Dealing with the homesick children, the lost telephones, the occasional breakages of this and that, the little conflicts between increasingly tired children as the week goes on all can be added to the list.

It’s fair to say that this is fairly extreme educational experience. 16-18 hour working days for a week are pretty demanding, physically, emotionally and intellectually. Looking back it’s perhaps not so strange that nobody ever mentioned this during teacher training!