Today was a very exciting day as we got to visit Rotterdam! The city is very modern and is the most American-like city I’ve seen in Europe. This is unfortunately due to the fact that it was heavily bombed during WWII. It was quite a process to get to the city. We took a train that had to be canceled due to an unfortunate incident with a train accident ahead of us.

Once we arrived at the city, we got to meet with Floating Farms. This company has a cow farm that floats on a Rotterdam river. The idea is that farms take up a lot of unusable land, and the availability decreases every year. Floating Farm is trying to fight this problem by building farms on the water in areas where hurricanes or other natural disasters occur. The problem with Rotterdam is that although it has incredible ports and transports many goods, this takes a lot of energy. The company is combatting this by having the farms local and therefore requiring less energy to transport goods. They want to create a circular supply chain. The company uses extra nutritious food for the cows, such as leftover beer broth from a brewery, gets the resources from the cows, and then gives them back to the city. They use other interesting resources like the grass from the Feyenoord soccer pitch. The process is very eye-catching and the engineering in the farm is impressive. There is a Roomba looking device that goes around that cleans the cow waste and collects the solid waste for fertilizer. The liquid waste is purified and put into the sewer. They also have a mixing machine to mix up the cow food since they are picky eaters! The goal for this company is to expand to other farms in the future, and hopefully expand to other port cities such as Singapore.

After the company visit, we went on a canal cruise. Surprisingly, it wasn’t raining! The weather held out great and the cruise was beautiful. Seeing the skyscrapers from afar really showed how modern the city is. I also got to do some vintage thrift shopping which means burn through even more euros. It honestly feels like euros are the same as Monopoly money. I bought a green shirt and some rings. Coincidentally, Drew and I ended up twinning, and everyone made sure to mention it. Dinner was amazing! We had kebabs and very good rice and soup. It was very nice to end the day with a good meal. I’ll be back in Amsterdam tomorrow, doei!