Contemporary architecture walk

The whole family came to the bus stop to see me off. So kind.

To my huge surprise, as I was walking into the station J and Y were there holding their bikes and grinning at me. They both work opposite the station and as they'd got near they'd seen my bus arriving so waited for me! More farewells.

The double-decker train to Rotterdam took only half an hour but I spent a good part of that hauling my bag up to where there were no empty seats, back down to, oh, first class, through first class to more first class and finally up again to a spare seat. Which turned out to be opposite a man talking very loudly on speakerphone to someone who couldn't hear him, on a line that seemed to keep cutting out. He then listened to something loud, then started coughing copiously. He seemed offended when I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and nose but we rapidly established that the only language we had in common was barely-suppressed resentment.

It's obvious that Rotterdam was almost entirely flattened in the second world war, and the rebuilding programme has not finished: both new building and renovation is going on everywhere. When I came across some home-made banners slung from balconies on a block of low-rise flats, probably 1960s, that all said 'sloop ons niet' (don't destroy us) I wondered whether building here had become a compulsion. I guess a city that designs and builds will attract architects and builders...

For the record. I saw:
- a strange skeleton of a building (extra 1), maybe a monument to something but I couldn't find out what
- the Timmer Huis, apparently balanced on just two points so it looks like 'floating pixels' but ground level was so obscured by other building work that the effect was lost on me.
- the outdoor artificial wave for surfers (Rif010)
- the food Market selling not ingredients, as I'd expected, but a vast range of cooked food, presumably for local office-worker lunches as well as for tourists.
- The famous upended yellow cubes, designed by the Dutch architect, Piet Blom, and built 1978-84. I couldn't imagine how the interior could be designed to make them a sensible, livable space so I went into the Kijk-Kubus Museum-house to find out. It can't. The space is absurdly impractical and wasteful. Apparently they are 'for people who have enough imagination to want to live in an urban tree house'. On my way out I asked the ticket-seller whether he lived there or would, and he was adamant that he wouldn't. But they are so popular that when they come on the market, they are sold almost immediately.

I should have stopped there but decided instead to walk to the south side of the New Maas river and admire the huge disused lift bridge (De Hef). Walking back over the sparkly pavements of Erasmus Bridge, I enjoyed looking at De Rotterdam (extra 2).

Walking 11½ km round Rotterdam was a challenge after three days of very little exercise other than standing and sitting, but by the time I flopped on my hotel bed I'd found my bearings and had a sense of the layout of the central part of the city.