The Butt Plug of Rotterdam

the psychedelic mural inside the Markthal

I spent my first day in the Netherlands on the verge of tears. Part of it was lack of sleep—I’d gotten only three hours the night before because my flight took off at six-thirty in the morning. But a good part of it was also culture shock. I’d spent eight days in Norway, a sparsely-populated land of quiet people, calm cities, and beautiful nature. Rotterdam was chaotic, filled with graffiti, weird statues, loud traffic, and people who looked like they were going to a music festival. The nature was limited to the rivers and canals, and some trees and grass here and there.

I’d read a whole book about the Netherlands before coming here, called Why the Dutch Are Different, and my biggest takeaway from that book was this: the Dutch are straightforward and honest, in their behaviors and actions and in how they present themselves. There’s no fear of standing out here, at least from what I can see. Dress however you want, have any kind of relationship you want, say whatever you want.

Rotterdam looks very industrial from high up; that’s the river Maas

Rotterdam is, in particular, even more unique than the rest of the Netherlands. In 1940, most of central Rotterdam was destroyed by Nazi planes, unfortunately only minutes after Rotterdam had actually surrendered because pilots didn’t get the message in time. Peter, the eighty-something guide who led my free walking tour, told us: “I used to say that the Germans destroyed Rotterdam, but then I had too many Germans on my tours and I had to start saying ‘Nazi Germany.'” He gestured to the one German guy on the tour, a smooth dude with perfect hair, perfect sunglasses, and a spotless leather jacket. “I will tell you more about your people later on the tour.” German Dude nodded and smirked, with the confidence only possible for a guy who knows he’s the best-looking person in the group.

The center of Rotterdam was rebuilt post-war in a variety of architectural styles using U.S. Marshall Plan funds and public money. You’ve got the Markthal (Market Hall), an arch-shaped building that houses food stalls, apartments, and a giant indoor mural that looks like it was painted by someone high on mushrooms. I had a beer in the Markthal with another solo female traveler. You also have the Cube Houses, an impractically designed building that looks like a bunch of yellow cubes melded together in a little cubic forest. Peter told the group that he used to have a girlfriend who lived in the Cube Houses. “There is nothing,” this wizened old guy told us, “quite like making love in a Cube House. I highly recommend it.” We cracked up.

the Cube Houses

There is art everywhere too: murals and street art on the pavement and the walls of buildings, commissioned statues dotting the public squares and walkways, and graffiti scrawled in metro stations and on benches and guardrails. A giant black braid stands by a canal, just across from a large, cheerful statue of Santa holding a bell in one hand and a butt plug in the other. When we stopped at this statue, Peter explained to an Asian woman on the tour, in a very matter-of-fact tone, that “a butt plug is a sex toy for homosexuals.” At first, the mayor who commissioned this statue thought the butt plug was a Christmas tree, and couldn’t understand why parents didn’t want this statue near their kids’ playgrounds. Today, everyone in Rotterdam know this statue as “The Butt Plug” (I’m sure kids still think that dear Santa is holding a Christmas tree though) and there is a hotel right next to it called “Hotel Unplugged.”

“Santa Claus,” aka “The Butt Plug”

It was on the walking tour with Peter, who cracked at least four jokes per minute, and my fellow tourists—a zany group that included long-haired, talkative Archie from the U.K. and his much-quieter buddy Mike, Robin the Australian who’d visited the Netherlands as a backpacker fifty years before, and a middle-aged Canadian couple who couldn’t fathom that my parents were letting me travel alone—where I finally settled in to the weirdness of Rotterdam. You’ve just got to accept it and roll with it. I’ll admit, this doesn’t come naturally to me. It took me two days and an old man pointing it out to me—“the American is so stuck up, she can’t say ‘butt plug’!”—to relax and go with the flow. I had fired right back at Peter, using the lingo I’d use in an art history class: “I was going to call it a phallic object." He'd fluttered his hands in a mock-impressed affect. “I’ve never heard that one before! I’m going to tell the next tour: I had an American woman call the butt plug a ‘phallic object.’” See what I mean? Go with the flow.

There is one name that you’ll see all over Rotterdam: Erasmus, the Northern Renaissance thinker, theologian, and philosopher who was born in Rotterdam but was not the city’s biggest fan. Unlike me, he clearly never warmed to Rotterdam and left the Netherlands, never to return. He died in Basel, Switzerland. Peter informed us that while Erasmus may not have liked Rotterdam, Rotterdam loved him because he was the city's only claim to fame. The university, the main hospital, the famous bridge—all of it’s named after Erasmus. Peter took great delight in playing the philosophy professor and read some quotes for us off a monument to Erasmus by an old church. One really stuck with me, because it actually perfectly describes how I approach life, and what I’m trying to do on this trip: “live as if you will die tomorrow, but learn as if you will live forever.”

a mural in the city center celebrating Erasmus’s life

I’ll leave you with that one as I sit on the train to Utrecht next to an old Dutch dude who just sneezed. Living bravely and learning constantly—that’s what I want my life to be about.