When I return to Rotterdam, I feel my feet land on something firm and familiar.
Perhaps it’s the design ambition that lives openly across the city: visible, imperfect, and unashamed. Buildings wear their flaws as lessons, streets show their experiments in plain sight.
The city holds a rare mix: tough and welcoming. Structured, yet willing to stay a little unruly. Raw in its edges and refined in its intent.
The port remains the pulse and the horizon. Industrial in its labour, poetic in its vastness.
And then the water taxi back: the sting of spray, the skyline shifting. A reminder that the city isn’t something framed. It’s a process made and remade by the people who pass through, and leave something of themselves behind.
What stays with me most is how present its migrant roots are, and how much room there is for the off-beat, the curious, the ones who didn’t fit elsewhere. Here, they have shaped, invented, adapted.
There’s friction, yes. But it’s the kind that refines, not erases. The kind that builds belonging instead of smoothing it away.
Rotterdam is always a little unpolished. Always honest. Maybe that’s why it feels like home.
