Half an eternity ago, I was in the process of throwing my goals for 2019 out of the window. It was January, the nights were long, the days were short and I was bored out of my mind. Everything I wrote down was either not exciting enough, or was bound to happen anyway, regardless of how hard I'd work. Then Ella from Ella Was Here came to the rescue and challenged me to visit a new city each month of the year. The Twelve Cities Challenge was born. I went to Paris for January, but had to stay a lot closer to home for February because of university assignments. After a quick glance at the map of my country, I knew exactly where I wanted to go: Dordrecht.

Dordrecht is a small city very close to Rotterdam. It's not very well-known, often ridiculed in a local saying, but . You can reach Dordrecht within minutes if you take the train from Rotterdam Central station, or you can take the Waterbus, a boat. Paying the fare works the exact same way is it works for all other public transport in the Rotterdam area; if you don't have an "OV chipkaart", you buy an RET day ticket and scan it upon getting aboard the boat. Even though I love trains, I like boats even better, mostly because I rarely get the opportunity to go anywhere by boat. I'd followed this route once before, back when I was in kindergarten, but barely remembered it. It was time to really get to know this city so surprisingly close to home, yet so unknown. So on a sunny day way back in February, I got on the Waterbus to Dordrecht.


As usual, I arrived at my destination with no plan at all. Actually, that's not entirely true. I'd thought about doing a street art route and had the vague idea of walking to the city center, whichever way that may be. Neither of those plans was thought through, so after picking a friend up at the quay where I got off the boat, I did what I always do when I don't know what to do in a new place: I started walking.


The walk to the city center would have taken no more than a few minutes... if I hadn't gotten distracted by just about everything along the way. Dordrecht became a city in 1220 and wasn't bombed to pieces in the Second World War, so it has something Rotterdam doesn't have: old, monumental buildings from centuries ago. Many of the streets in and around the city center are small, winding and flanked by high, small houses from the 19th century and earlier. Some of these houses are now antique shops or sell vintage items. I spent ages windowshopping - until I saw the water of the marina.
As in many parts of my country, water is everywhere in Dordrecht. But whereas Amsterdam has its canals and Rotterdam has the river Maas dividing the city in two, Dordrecht's water isn't as omnipresent. It's been turned into a marina some time in the Middle Ages. The marina is relatively small, very cute and a perfect example of an old Dutch cityscape. Countless little boats and yachts bob up and down gently in the calm water. There is literally not much more to do than walk along the quays and look at all the sails, gear and old boats, but that's exactly what makes the place so charming. I could feel the stress leaving my body as I took pictures of the marina. I could have stayed there for hours, just looking at the water, oblivious even to the Pokémon Go players who had come to Dordrecht that day for a community event.


A million pictures of boats later, I decided it was time for lunch. My friend and I discussed our plans for the rest of the day over sandwiches: We'd do the street art route, look at the Church of Our Lady, go to the comic book store I vaguely remembered from a visit almost two decades ago, then catch the boat back home. I have to admit I did a terrible job preparing this short day trip. I couldn't find the street art route online anymore, and when I did find it, I noticed that my reading comprehension skills were not strong enough to understand the description. There was no map available, but since we had access to Google Maps, we figured we'd be fine.

We were not fine. The challenge began as soon as we'd left the old city center behind us. We did find the starting point, directly next to the train station, but the next street in the description was nowhere to be found. A quick Google search showed us that we first needed to walk down another street, which wasn't mentioned in the description, to get to the street we needed to be on. This happened time and time again. You had to be a local to be able to follow this route. We fell into a time-consuming and frustrating pattern: Read the description, google the street, get directions to that street, read the description again, follow the description for a couple of dozens of meters, maybe find a mural, and repeat. We gave up after three murals and went to a Japanese store instead.


Although the sun was still shining when we left the store, I was getting cold. We headed back to the old city center and walked around for a bit in search of a small coffee shop. We came past a machine that was writing a Bible, the comic book store on Scheffersplein which was still there after all those years, the only mill left in the city of Dordrecht and the Church of Our Lady before my friend spotted a place called Francis Lunch & Baked Goods. We ordered some drinks and talked for a while. It had been a good day, but it was coming to an end. At 5 pm, exactly 6 hours after my arrival, I boarded the boat to go back home. As I sat down in my chair and looked out over the water, I felt an unexpected sense of relief. With Paris and Dordrecht under my belt, I only had ten more cities to go to complete the Twelve Cities Challenge. I already had my next destination in mind. Bring it on, I thought to myself as the boat left to bring me home.