Erasmus Plus goes Rotterdam

Rotterdam’s architecture:

Rotterdam is a great city to admire architecture from the last decades. After the Second World War the entire city centre and most of the buildings around were destroyed. Just a small number could survive, which is the reason for many new modern buildings in the city.

Rotterdam has a completely new train station, which earned the nickname “Station Kapsalon”, a huge market hall, which is also an iconic piece of architecture, a living complex called “urban forest” or “Kijk Kubus” created by architect Pete Bloom, the Erasmus Bridge and building and the Euromast-Tower where you can have a nice view over the city.

In addition, Rotterdam has the largest port in Europe, which takes care off the entire European area.

All in all Rotterdam is a great city to visit, because of these many sights and things to do.

School day at Lentiz-Life-College:

During the lessons about Dutch expressions about Waste & Energy, we had a great insight in the dutch language! We learned many words in dutch with the topic Waste & Energy in a playful way, while our knowledge of Waste & Energy and the dutch language was strengthened at the same time. Filling out the papers was a lot of fun and it improved our understanding of Dutch.

In the first lesson we learned something about the different types of energy.

In the second lesson we improved our knowledge about the energy of the human body and filled out highly interesting worksheets as well.

Overall it was a brilliant experience and we had the chance to improve our language, learn about other cultures and especially about waste and energy.

Trip to Maeslandkering:

On may 31st we did a trip to Maeslandkering, the dam “Keringhuis” which can be placed into the water when needed.

When we arrived we watched a short documentary about why this system was created and build. After that, a polite staff member showed us around in the information centre and explained to us how it works. It has an automatic system, which analyses the water level of the river. If the system registers an unnormal level, the dam moves automatically in the middle of the river to prevent damage.

The responsibles at the dam said, the system is very helpful and protective and they trust it more than they would trust a team of workers making the decision to open or close the dam. If there would be a mistake in the system, there is always the option for two specific workers to open or close the dam with keys.

When he finished explaining we walked outside, where he showed us the massive metal structure, that can stop tons and tons of water from flowing into the Netherlands. The man, as well as the documentary explained, why global warming is such a threat for the Netherlands, as big cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam can easily get flooded by too much water, by being very close to the water. There are also places, that are 6.7 meters below sea level, where flooding water would also be a huge problem. It was really informative and exciting seeing such a massive structure live in person.

In summary we learned pretty interesting things about the water and different systems of preventing it from being damaged.

Written by Louis Westrich, Sarah Winkler, Emil Karabegovic and Colin Kehr