Studio Catinca Tilea

“When I moved to Rotterdam, in 1993, many people told me that it’s a big scary city. So I got a bit nervous when moving, you know, as a young girl from Brabant, leaving for the city. You have to start all over again, you don’t know anyone. And yet I’ve never felt unsafe in Rotterdam. It’s a very multicultural place, but I normally don’t notice it that much anymore; only when my relatives from Brabant come to visit. My sisters always get so shocked when they’re here. But the weird thing about Rotterdam, at least the part where I live, is that it’s just like a village. Rotterdam, despite being a big city, seems to be made up of small villages.”

“I’m not really like most other Greeks I’ve encountered studying here. Most of them simply live together at the university campus and hardly ever go downtown. I love going downtown, it’s where stuff is happening! I think that when you’re a foreigner and only stick to your own kind, you’ll be missing out on a lot of cool stuff. Rotterdam’s art scene for example is really fascinating, there’s so much happening, but you can only find this if you know where to search. That’s why it might seem like a very enclosed world to an outsider. Another very important part of Rotterdam’s life is cycling. Everybody rides a bike here since everything is at a reasonable distance. That’s why I would love to live somewhere near the center, where I could always cycle to wherever I’d have to go.”

“I was really disappointed when I first arrived here, because I assumed Rotterdam would have been like Utrecht or Amsterdam, the old Dutch cities. But I decided to stay here. There is something about Rotterdam that I ended up loving. However, Rotterdam is a difficult city to truly understand.”

“What I like most about Rotterdam isn’t a specific location, but the fact that it has people from practically every culture in the world. That is really the coolest thing about this city: its multicultural society. It’s a big mix of everything, you can see it in the foreign shops, restaurants, et cetera. There are so many foreign restaurants here where you can actually experience the local cuisine from those countries. I think that people seem to emphasize too much on when stuff goes wrong between different groups, and forget to realize how special it is to have all these different cultures living side by side.”