Today, we woke up in Rotterdam for the first time. Our hotel room (including the bathroom) was decorated with prints of tarsiers with bright orange eyes, which were a little scary while showering. We hopped on the Rotterdam metro and made our way to our first stop of the day, a floating farm.

We attended a presentation about the farm first, and the employee told us about how the floating farm works. The farm we visited is actually a prototype that the developers decided to build just to test the idea and decide what they liked what what they wanted to change. It primarily houses cows and employs a variety of sustainability techniques, with half of its energy coming from solar panels on the farm. The cows are primarily fed food waste, most of which is donated or given to the farm by local organizations.

However, the company also farms plants, many of which are grown inside vertically, entirely fueled by energy from the solar panels. Lots of these are micro-greens, which are healthier and more sustainable than other greens, but they also grow herbs used to flavor the cheese from the cows on the farm.

After our tour of the farm and a tasting of the cheeses and milks that the cows produced, we took a water taxi through the rain to a cafeteria across the river. We were given a variety of delicious sandwiches and tomato soup, including a traditional Dutch sandwich with raw meat that many people in our group tried, although I was not so bold. After lunch, we toured RDM, which was a community that housed lots of different startup companies, all of which supported each other in a large building.

One of the interesting startup companies within RDM was a group called Urban Reef that created sustainable concrete with one of the most abundant minerals found within the earth’s crust, olivine. Olivine is able to bond to CO2, and the company molded concrete in the shape of coral to add to dying coral reefs in hopes of restoring them in addition to absorbing CO2. For dinner, we were set free to explore the city, so we headed to the center of the city and chose an Italian restaurant we stumbled across, which turned out to be delicious!