Yes, there’s a crisis going on and some of the grass roots entertainment is taking a mighty beating, cash-wise.
The outdoor movie theatre Pleinbioscoop (pic) in Rotterdam, located at the Lloyd Multiplein, Schiehaven, near the pittoresque Delftshaven, the old harbour, is trying to stay afloat by disallowing that people bring their own drinks. Do look at the pic, they have couches and lamps to make it look like a big living room.
The organisation claims that they will be selling drinks at a reasonable price. They have also decided to set up a ‘coat check’ for anyone who brings glass bottles by mistake. Many a venue around the world would just force you to chuck out your booze in a bin, but these people are just plain nice. You can get a ticket for your ‘bottle check’, so you can pick up your wares at the end of the movie.
The city of Rotterdam has felt it necessary that the Kralingse Bos, a big park, get these colourful signs to warn families and the likes that gay men are getting busy (think closeted or married gay hooking up). The direction of the feet in this pictogramme is a bit confusing to those in the know. If gays are caught outside the marked zone in Rotterdam, they will be fined. The sign also implies that lesbians stay at home and watch telly. That was sarcasm.
Ironically, many of the places where straight couples and parties of three or more have sex in the woods or near the beach are illegal, and people just get fined. They should stay home and watch telly as well.
The person in charge of this typical show of Dutch tolerance was quoted as saying, “everybody has the right to have fun”. Straights, however, don’t have their own signs or special party places. Interesting reverse discrimination.
Political party Leefbaar Rotterdam plans to start a black book of the dirtiest places in Rotterdam. The scuzzy places will receive the Golden Cockroach award. Naming and shaming is apparently still considered a good way to get people to clean up their trash, but that remains to be seen — literally.
People from Rotterdam can send in pictures of oveflowing rubbish bins, rubbish on the street and whatever else fits the bill. Leefbaar Rotterdam plans to post the pics on its website. Mmm!
I snapped this rubbish bin on Queen’s Day in Amsterdam a few years back. Notice how small the rubbish bins are. Plastic and glass bottles can easily be recycled at the supermarket, but not cans. Cans here are mostly made of steel and a bit of aluminium and are fished out before the rubbish goes to the incinerator.
I can tell you that these bins fill up very quickly with beer and cola cans, especially if there’s a party going on.
Dutch gamers in Rotterdam have scored a Guinness world record for the most hours of consecutive gaming: 50 hours playing Red Dead Redemption. The old record was held by Chirantan Patnaik from India at 40 hours 20 minutes, according to the print version Dutch daily De Pers.
The attempt to break the record was organised by Dutch company Vogel’s Products that wanted to promote a Sony PlayStation 3 controller.
Florentijn Hofman, the artist who gave us huge cuddly dolls and huge rubber ducks, now has some very colourful yet huge ‘folded paper boats’ (made of metal) on display in Rotterdam, installed just a few days ago.
There are tons of pictures showing all five boats of different colours, even a pink one.
Not only does Hogeschool Rotterdam test its students, it is also planning to ‘test’ its teachers. After having received many complaints from students about having to wait too long to get their test scores, the school will now evaluate its teachers based on the turnaround time for grading exams, according to De Telegraaf.
If a teacher takes longer than 20 working days to come up with a grade for any given test, they will be denied a raise at the end of the year, writes Algemeen Dagblad.
Public service employees in the Netherlands face aggression and violence on the streets more and more often. Onlookers unfortunately do not intervene often enough when they encounter a situation like this. A live interactive billboard in Amsterdam and Rotterdam is used to place people in a similar situation witch confronts them with their inactivity.
This huge billboard has been placed on the Rembrandtplein in Amsterdam recently, an area with many bars and cafés that are busy and very populated. According to many media reports, there has been an increase of violence against public service employees such as tram and bus drivers, but also, as shown in the film, paramedics.
I think it’s safe to say that many people do not know what to do when they are confronted with violence besides calling the emergency number 112 and/or running away. Intervening physically or verbally will get you hurt, as there have been enough stabbings and deaths related to trying to stop violence. It’s also much easier to snap a picture with your mobile phone, but no one wants to get caught doing that if their flash goes off.
Yes, it is sad that people have been known to do nothing, but again, although I have intervened and called 112, I wouldn’t do it either if I were to get beaten for it.
Noise pollution, Dutch style: some 16.5 million of us are packed into a small country and the people living in the four big cities known in Dutch as the ‘Randstad’ (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague) often live in old houses that have very little isolation. I have friends who refuse to live anywhere with upstairs neighbours, and in my case here in Amsterdam I can hear the neighbours’ dog yelping at passers-by. When I lived in Nijmegen, the old man downstairs had the telly on really loud. The day that stopped, we found out he had passed away.
We can’t just move to the country: for most jobs you need to leave within 10 km of your work because beyond that employers would have to pay for your travel costs and therefore will not hire you. Coming by car means major traffic jams, and so we live in town and often bike to work. You can’t rent anything in the country, you have to buy, which many people can’t do. Oh, and in the country, they have bored youth with noisy, high-pitched scooters driving around, which has become a major noise pollution issue.
So tape your neighbours in the hopes of getting them evicted is a new strategy in the country’s second biggest city, Rotterdam. Granted, many people will pipe down if you ask them nicely, but many people, and I am sorry to say, usually with children, have no idea what kind of anti-social racket they are making.
“Since February, Rotterdam is offering possible victims of ‘noise pollution’ a noise-o-meter to monitor the nuisance. The noise-o-meter is part of a campaign to counter ‘neighbourhood terror’. According to a city survey last year, some 49,000 people in the Netherlands’ second major city say they regularly suffer serious nuisance from neighbours. The noise-o-meter offers ‘an objective measure of the sound, which gives us a stronger legal case in case of an eviction request,’ said city executive Hamit Karakus about the new weapon.”
If you want to become a CEO or a supervisor of one of the 25 Dutch companies that make up the AEX, the index of the country’s most actively traded securities, you’d better study economics in Rotterdam or civil engineering in Delft, Z24 reports.
Together, both universities have produced the majority of current CEOs and supervisors of AEX companies. The oldest university of the country, that of Leiden, and the largest universities, those of Amsterdam and Utrecht, play lesser roles in supplying large Dutch companies with their management. Fifteen of the 25 CEOs are graduates of either Rotterdam (8) or Delft (7).
Filed under: Art,Design by Orangemaster @ 11:29 am
Designed by Belgian artist Carsten Höller, you are looking at a revolving hotel room installed in Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum. You can book this art hotel room for somewhere between 275 and 450 euro a night and have access to the entire museum to visit and enjoy in peace. The big glass plates that the furniture is placed on is what revolves very slowly.
This hotel room is part of an exhibition by Höller entitled Divided Divided, running until 25 April.
If you want to become a CEO or a supervisor of one of the 25 Dutch companies that make up the AEX, the index of the country’s most actively traded securities, you’d better study economics in Rotterdam or civil engineering in Delft, 
