[dropcap type=”4″]D[/dropcap]e Maasstad, Roffa or 010, whatever you want to call Rotterdam, it’s definitely the best city for skateboarding in The Netherlands. Since I moved to the Netherlands, two years ago, I used to visit pretty often Rotterdam’s rival city Amsterdam before I finally managed to visit Rotterdam and naturally, I still really like Amsterdam and its lovely old city centre but, quoting the Dutch skater Marcel Veldman: “it’s not as good as Rotterdam when it comes to our fine art of destroying public and private property on our useless wooden toys”.
The Westblaak skatepark is for sure your best bet to find all the locals as they usually meet at this skatepark, it’s central, close to the skateshops Skatestore and Sevenply, and of course the coffeeshop. On a random day, you would easily run into PROs like Nassim Guammaz, Ricardo Paterno, Wouter de Jong or Tim Zom, as they pretty much grew up skating there. Also, the rest of the Bombaklats crew is hanging out there quite often, usually followed by a street session anywhere in the city.
If you’re hungry, there’s stuff from all over the world, after all, it’s the biggest port in Europe and till 2004 even the biggest port in the world. But not far from skatepark Westblaak you will find the “Witte de With straat”, where you can find all you want food wise, some hostels and hotels, coffeeshop and you’re right in the centre, where the magic happens.
If you’re thirsty, not far from all those places, there’s a bar called Tiki’s. It’s the local hangout of most skateboarders but definitely not a skate bar. It’s more something like a ‘rocknroll-sixties-Hawaiian-garage-bar’, if that’s even something…but drinks prices are reasonable! For the munchies, there’s the Tiki burger, both for carnivores and vegetarians. It’s only open ’till 02:00 so at that point, it would be wise to follow one of the locals or the girl you’re trying to hook up with. Hope to meet you there!
