Haarlem and Amsterdam

So, I had a blast in Amsterdam and Haarlem!



Don't I look thrilled?

We stayed at The Flying Pig in downtown Amsterdam. For 16 Euro a night it was pretty good! Free breakfast, access to a kitchen, cats, a bar, good music, and a no-smoking rule for the individual rooms. I met up with Kyle, a friend from MSU who's studying in the Netherlands. We ...

- went to the Anne Frank house
- the Oude and Nieuwe Kerken ( old and new churches )
- the Rijksmuseum ( host to the Night Watch and a lot of Golden Age art )
- Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum
- the Hortus Botanicus



The New Church ^


The Old Church ^



^ Hortus Botanicus

and went to a few small bars outside of the downtown area with really great staff and patrons.

We also spent a few days couchsurfing in Haarlem with a family that kindly let us stay with them as we tore up their kitchen trying to make pancakes ( we cleaned up, don't worry ). We had gone on a day-long bike ride through the area around Haarlem ( countryside, farmland, small villages, the sand dunes, and the beach ) and on our way had stopped at a windmill that was still functioning and had a shopinside. We bought some diksap ( it means "thick syrup" or juice, really. Getcher mind out of the gutter ) and flour for making pancakes. However, all of our attempts to make pancakes were for nought, so the daughter of our host, gave us a hand. Staying with a family was a great way to interact with actual Dutch people that went beyond buying postcards. Klaas, our host, shared some of his family history, told us a bit about Dutch society post WWII, and so on. He asked us about regional differences in the USA and we talked a little politics. Much better than staying in a smokey hostel.





Unfortunately we didn't have time to go into the old St Bavo's Cathedral* in Haarlem. There's a giant organ that Mozart once played. The old St Bavo's was taken over by the Protestants and the Catholics built a new Church of St Bavo in the late 1800s. We didn't visit the inside of that church either, as it was closed. The Protestants stripped the churches bare of any iconology and painted them white wherever possible, because as a plaque in the Nieuwe Kerk said, "After all, what mattered in Protestant services was the sermon" ( apparently it wasn't so in the Catholic church. Note the sarcasm in my voice ). Whereas many people are now literate, folk from the Middle Ages relied on images in stone, glass, and on canvas to learn, remind, and meditate. So to us ( and especially anyone with a Protestant upbringing ) all of these images seem totally extravagant, unnecessary, and we likely don't know any of the figures or their symbols.


Our last day in Haarlem we went ice skating, but I have no pictures of that. We got hockey style skates which likely made it easier to balance, as they're longer. We spent the first 15 minutes on the central rink getting a feeling for skating again and then spent an hour or so on the outer rink. Alex noted that the IJsbaan ( ice rink in Dutch ) was next to the Eisenbahn ( railroad in German ).


On another related note, knowing German helped us get around a bit in the Netherlands and I even managed to eek out a few sentences in ( really bad ) Dutch.

It was an all-together wonderful trip :)



^ The route we took around Haarlem, roughly.

*For clarity's sake and thanks to a commenter, it should be noted that since St. Bavo's is no longer Catholic, it is no longer a cathedral.