All good things must come to an end, and this stood true on Day 12–our last day in the Netherlands before departing back to Pittsburgh. Today was a day filled with lessons on sustainability, but also a bittersweet goodbye to this experience that I have cherished. In the morning, we visited the Rotterdam Floating Farm,…
Tag: Joseph Mollura
Exploring Rotterdam (Day 11)
As we approached the end of our trip to the Netherlands, we spent Day 11 exploring the history of Rotterdam’s architecture and how it is being used to make the city safer and more sustainable. Rotterdam is noticeably much more modern than the city of Amsterdam due to the bombings that occurred during WWII. These…
The DeltaWorks Visit (Day 10)
Today was a very exciting day for me as an engineering student since we got the opportunity to tour the engineering marvel that is the DeltaWorks project. This 30-year project was a response to the North Sea Flood of 1953, which laid waste to several Dutch towns and left around 1,800 people dead in its…
Visiting TU Delft (Day 9)
On Day 9 of our global experience in Amsterdam, we visited the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). This university is a top engineering school in the Netherlands and is even compared to MIT in terms of academia and recognition. This school has also dedicated an abundance of resources and funding to sustainability research and…
Sleeping in and The Watersnoodmuseum (Day 8)
It only took eight days of being in the Netherlands, but I finally got to sleep in! It was nice being able to get a full eight hours, and I truly felt more recharged today than I have in several days. After getting this rest, we were off to the Watersnoodmuseum, also known as the…
Adventures in the Hague (Day 7)
A week into our experience in the Netherlands, we boarded a train en route to the Hague. The Hague is where the governing body of the Netherlands resides, despite the country’s capital being Amsterdam. The Seat of the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and even the Dutch royal family are all situated within the Hague. The…
Goodbye Amsterdam, Chemicals, Hello Rotterdam! (Day 6)
Today marked the last time on the trip that I would wake up in the great city of Amsterdam. The five days that I spent in Amsterdam are five days to remember for the rest of my life. I learned so much about a foreign culture, made memories that will last a lifetime, and made…
A History Lesson, Van Gogh, and Alumni (Day 5)
Day 5 of our trip to the Netherlands started out with a tour of the famous Anne Frank House. I have never been somewhere so powerful and filled with emotion as I could feel myself choking up hearing the story of the Franks hiding in the Secret Annex. The house was filled with quotes from…
Cheese, Dikes, and Sunsets (Day 4)
Today was an especially exciting day for me, as we were visiting a popular cheese manufacturer called Henri Willing Cheese. The cheese shop was located in the middle of vast farmland riddled with windmills, green glass, frogs, ducks, goats, cows, and much more. This seemed like a sight from a fairy tale. After a lesson…
Paintings, Auctions, and Floating Houses (Day 3)
No sleeping in for me on Day 3! After getting up to a nice and early 5 a.m. alarm, it was time to begin our agenda for the day. This included taking a tour around Royal FloraHolland, a flower auctioning company that prides itself on the millions of flowers it distributes per day inside its…
Chocolate and Touring (Day 2)
After getting some much-needed rest after our first day in Amsterdam, I woke up excited to explore the city properly. After eating breakfast that was noticeably similar to the typical American breakfast, we met Brian and departed on the metro towards Grand Centraal. After a short walk through the city, my group of fellow students…
Jet Lag, Scavenging, and Tulips (Day 1)
As a first-time international traveler, I experienced the horrors of jet lag firsthand—and trust me, I am not having fun recovering. After initially waking up at 6 a.m. on Saturday and finally touching down in the Netherlands at 5:50 a.m., sleep had become a foreign concept to me. I will pass out immediately after I…
THE NETHER(lands)
Hello everyone! My name is Joe Mollura, and I am a freshman engineering student in the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. I am from Beaver, PA, and I am pursuing a chemical engineering degree. I was also admitted into the Fredericks Honors College and am currently working towards my honors degree….