In Haarlem

First, some preliminaries: the downside to being able to check in early at the hotel is that I was given the single room on the fourth floor which no one had stayed in the night before (which equals the fifth floor in the U.S., as the main floor doesn't count as the first floor.) There is no elevator in the hotel, only a narrow, steep and sharply winding staircase. The good news, when I'm able to catch my breath, I have a decent view from my window:


It was in the mid-fifties today and sunny. A light chilly breeze could catch you in the shade, but the sunshine felt good.



I departed the hotel and walked less than five minutes to Amsterdam's Centraal Station. There I purchased a Dagretour ticket in second class for Haarlem - cost, €8.10. A Dagretour is a round trip ticket good on the same day of travel only, and is cheaper than two one-way tickets. This was to be my first experience in the second class car of a European train.

Trains leave Centraal Station and go through Haarlem about six times an hour, so jumping on a train wasn't an issue. I jumped on an Intercity train, which is similar in concept to the commuter rail back home and nothing like the longer-trip ICE trains I took in Germany six months ago. Travel time to Haarlem was about twenty minutes. Second class was more crowded than my prior train trips, but it honestly didn't matter for the short trip and the seat was comfy enough.



I arrived at the Haarlem train station at around 10:30 AM CET, as you can see from the clock midway up the left hand tower. The center of town, the Grote Markt, was about a ten minute walk through pretty streets with little shops and people going about their everyday business.









The Grote Markt itself is a wide open brick-cobbled plaza surrounded on all sides by really old buildings and replicas of really old buildings. Many are now souvenir shops and restaurants.








There were lots of crisscrossing side streets coming into the Grote Markt, as well as parallel and connecting ones that also showcased old and interesting architecture. I spent a couple of hours meandering, then I had lunch at one of the open air cafes right in the Grote Markt:


The beer was a Dutch one, a Wieckse Witte - it was kind of sweet and was served with an orange slice floating in it. The green thing sticking out of the beer is NOT a straw - it's solid plastic with a round flat end the size of a quarter. I think the idea was to squish the orange slice into the beer at the bottom of the glass. I didn't greatly care for the beer before, and orange juice didn't seem to help. The sandwich was another matter - it was yummy. It was a club sandwich composed of a fried egg, thin-sliced chicken, tomatoes, pearl onions, red peppers, "fancy" lettuce and mayonnaise.

After lunch I decided to visit the oldest museum in the Netherlands, the Teylers Museum, which first opened to the public in 1784.


It wasn't looking too good as I approached the museum -- it was wrapped with construction scaffolding and I believed that my museum curse from last September's trip was still haunting me. Fortunately, however, 95% of this charming museum was open, and for €10, it was my oyster.


















It is a quaint museum, which houses collections of fossils, bones, early electrical and Enlightenment scientific equipment, and impressive geological specimen display, fine art paintings from Dutch and European Masters, and a really cool oval library. Most of the description tags on the exhibits were obviously typed using an old-fashioned manual typewriter and are in Dutch only. Sprinkled hither and thither, however, are laser printed placards in Dutch and English. The display cases are collections of the kind of one-offs you would see in the study of nineteenth century English nobles - they don't all match and were obviously collected themselves over the years by the museum. I have to say that in some respects it was simultaneously the least polished and most impressive museum I've seen in a long while.

After meandering through the Teylers Museum for a goodly while, I decided to end my Haarlem odyssey. I headed back to the train station, just missed a train and had to wait a whopping 20 minutes for another, and made my way back to Amsterdam. It was dinner time, and I decided to be lazy and go to the incongruous "Steak and Pizza" restaurant just down the street from my hotel. I was the only one in there for the first few minutes (I wonder why?) and then two muscle heads from Alaska waltz in, half-baked on the stuff they sell in one of the "coffee shops" next door. Nice enough guys, but they started to regale me with stories of their exploits at the dance club the night before. I politely agreed that they were representing American young manhood well, finished my dinner (a Hawaiian pizza - how's that for 49th and 50th states representing in Amsterdam!) and headed back to the hotel to write this blog.

It's now about 7:05 PM local time, and I'm getting beat. I think I might force myself to go and have a beer across the street at a nice-looking Irish-themed pub and then turn in.

Tune in next time for the Hague ....

Location:Haarlem,The Netherlands