Afternoon in Enschede

We spent our first full day sleeping half of it away. Roxi got up first but I was just wiped out from the previous day of travel so I slept in until about 1:30 pm. The rest of that day was spent taking care of essential errands like groceries, signing the apartment lease contract and getting internet. The sun sets around 4:30 pm here so we really didn't have much daylight left after taking care of those things.

Similarly we had some errands to attend to on our second day, but we took care of most of them in the morning. It was a beautiful day compared with the rainy night of our arrival and overcast first day. The sky was clear by noon and the sun was as high in the sky as it could be at this latitude and time of year. So after noon, we took a train into downtown Enschede with hopes of getting bicycles (the preferred mode of travel around here) and getting a Dutch bank account set up. We made the mile and a half walk to the train station taking in some of the campus sites on our way.


Campus as seen from the main entrance.


University of Twente - The Entrepreneurial University

After the quick five minute train ride into town we quickly found the bicycle shop. Unfortunately they didn't have any second-hand bikes at the moment and new bikes were bit out of our budget. They were very nice and told us they should have used bikes in a few weeks. As it turned out, we also didn't end up getting a bank account as we forgot to bring any of our US banking information with us (d'oh!). In the end it was okay though because we got a chance to walk around the Oude Markt (Old Market) area of town and did a lot of window shopping.


Enschede Station


Street in the Oude Markt.


Sweet shop


Cheese shop


Sculptures on the roof of a theater.


Grote Kerk (Large Church) in the Oude Markt.


Grote Kerk in the Oude Markt.


Ceramic love seat




Het ei van Ko (Ko's Egg) Fountain in Oude Markt. See a live webcam of this area here.

So we didn't get bikes or a bank account, but we got to see part of Enschede. Plus we went to a liquor store and bought several bottles of local Grolsch beer. I'd say it was an afternoon well spent!