Rotterdam City Centre

Het Potlood, originally uploaded by gniezen.

This afternoon I had some time to visit Rotterdam's city centre, where you can find the famous Het Potlood, or Pencil House, and the Kubuswonings, or Cube Houses.

Now, usually I don't find shopping very relaxing or exciting, unless I'm in a book store or in an electronics store. :P My mission for the afternoon was to find an Afrikaans-Nederlands dictionary, and the best place to try would be Selexys Donner. Yes, I know, as an Afrikaans-speaking person I also twitched when I first read it, but Selexys Donner is an innocent little bookstore... OK, not really little - this place is HUGE!! Imagine a bookstore with 9 (yes, 9!) floors with books covering almost every topic under the sun. There's a floor dedicated to classical music and a floor for all other types of music (including CDs, DVDs and sheet music). I even found sheet music books for Green Day and 30 Seconds to Mars :) There's a floor with a coffee shop and books on sale, and walls and walls covered with all my favourite computer books :P Needless to say, I spent more than an hour in there before walking over to the electronics store next door.

Mediamarkt is an electronics store that has one floor for TV/DVD/stereo systems and other electronics, one floor for household electronics and home wares, and one floor dedicated to games/music/consoles. Imagine walking through a store where there are so many LCD TVs that they take up half of the one floor and literally hurt your eyes when you look at them :)

TU Eindhoven has been able to organise housing for me, very close to the university and at a reasonable price. Unfortunately I will have to share a kitchen with 4 other people. Tomorrow I'm off to see the HR people again and sort out some admin stuff, and I will also meet with some housing agents to see if I will be able to organise housing on my own.