The city of Utrecht. Do you see anything wrong with that sentence? No? Let me give you a hint, it’s like an IQ test, you have to find out which word it is that doesn’t match with the other three. City. The *city* of Utrecht. What do you mean city, where is the city? Being the 4th biggest (could you run that through wikipedia for me?) *city* in Holland, one would almost expect to find a city here. Except there is none, what you find is basically a huge suburb. If you pick some random person from outside the country, you tell them Utrecht is one of the bigger cities and you walk them around Utrecht I’m pretty sure they will say "this is nice, where is the centre?" "we’re right in the middle of it" "what, _this_??" Uhm, yeah.. kind of.. I guess. Hmmm. So why do they call it a city? Well, by the number of citizens it qualifies for city status I guess, other than that there isn’t much to suggest that there is a city somewhere nearby. And I live right downtown.

So what is it? Suburbia.. Densely populated housing areas, lots of narrow streets, residential buildings with shops on the ground floor, very little traffic, few cars, tons of bikes, quiet, cozy, peaceful. Flat as the ocean, buses, no subway, no busy streets, no big intersections, no cars exceeding 40 km/h. Canals, every few blocks there is one, tiny bridges crossing them, tiny roads on either side, with parked cars and bicycles in abound. In all of the "city" I’ve seen so far, two, I repeat two, streets with more than one lane. I’ve only seen one gas station so far.

But it’s more than that, stores open at 1pm on Mondays (no, that’s not a typo), close at 6pm on Fridays. Close at 6pm all weekdays, in fact. After 6, the city is almost completely shut down, what’s left is restaurants, clubs, bars and the odd shop. Banks open at 9am.. Stores in the mall open at 10 (!) It’s all very pedestrian, noone is in a hurry, noone is walking fast, bikers obey the tiny traffic lights in the bike lanes when crossing a street where no car has driven for 2 days. The only thing city-like is the aptly named Centraalstation and the mall, which connects to it.

And this is the heart of Europe afterall, although it feels like a quiet holiday town for people relishing escape from hectic city life. To think I expected to come from Trondheim, which isn’t quite a city (but comes closer to the mark), where the _city centre_ is tiny (as opposed to non-existent), to Utrecht, where I expected a medium sized city with busy city life, seems like a huge misunderstanding. That’s not to say Utrecht isn’t nice, it just isn’t a city, that’s all.