I Heart Haarlem
Haarlem is only a forty minute bus ride from Amsterdam's Schipol Airport. I can't remember being so engrossed and charmed with n a place after only spending a day and a morning and an afternoon.
You take the 300 bus from Haarlem from the Schiphol airport, 175 from the Zuid or the 8 from the Central Amsterdam station. It takes anywhere from 30-40 minutes, but what you get is a wonderful town with some great heritage and 600,000 less people than in Amsterdam.
One of the first things I did was go up to the sixth floor cafeteria of the V&D department store in central Haarlem. The food is great, the view is outstanding, and there is a dependably clean bathroom to use for only .25 Euros. For one or some combination of these factors I found myself returning to this location several times during my three brief visits to this city.
This was a great town to wander and observe the various trades people, who sometimes work late in the evening do everything from repair roofs to cobble and brick work. It apparently takes quite a lot of people to keep up a city that is hundreds of years old.
Food options in this town were plentiful and not so much the touristy ones that were so prominent in Amsterdam. The lower shot is from my last dinner on this trip at a wonderful restaurant called Jacobus Pieck which is noted for their reasona.bly priced dinner special. I got there at about 5:30 and sat on the back porch/patio. When Ieft at close to seven the place was at capacity with locals enjoying their meals. It is located just a couple blocks south of the cathedral on Warmossetraat. Highly recommended
St. Bavochurch is a medieval cathedral that flipped to Protestantism after the Spanish occupation ended in the 16th century. It has huge buttresses that ultimately were not needed because the town fathers ran out of cash and put in a wooden vaulted ceiling. The great Frans Hals is buried there along with hundreds of others. Mozart played the cathedral's pipe organ. On my visit during the last hour it is open in the afternoon featured someone rehearsing some Bach on this mighty instrument.
Impressive, but medieval cathedrals are pretty cold disparaging places despite their aspirations to bring you close to the power and the glory and all that. If I was having a spiritual crisis, especially centuries ago, I don't think this would be my first choice to hang out.
The bicycles of Haarlem were not nearly as prolific as those in the big A. I would also venture to say that the demographic of riders was much broader, both younger and older. I would have loved to have had enough Dutch to hear what the question of the day was to the man on the street.
If you have a nice day in Haarlem, I can't recommend enough the canal tour. You get to travel on several eras of canal waterway, pass by a windmill, a bunch of churches and if you are lucky, some of the populace out enjoying the first few days of spring. But also you go under a bridge that contains one of the tunnels that the resistance used to evade Nazis in WWII. Just like in the movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment