It's not a church it's a birthday cake!

I arrived in Haarlem in the late afternoon and headed straight for my hotel in the middle of town. There aren’t any hostels in the middle of Haarlem (I guess most people stay in Amsterdam and travel out just for the day or stay out at the beach which is a little further to the west) so I was staying in a budget hotel (well budget by European standards anyway). After a bit of trouble working out where reception was, I headed upstairs to drop off my bags. The stairs are steep and a little windy and they had a very low ceiling (for me to notice, it has to be seriously low). The room was nice though and I had my own TV which is always a bonus.

I was starving after only having cake for lunch so I set off for a quick walk around the square and to grab some dinner. I didn’t feel like having a sit down dinner so ended up getting some fries at a place just up the street from the meat selling hall (next to the church). And I’m glad that I did. They are the best fries that I have had in the whole time that I’ve been in the Netherlands and they were up against some fairly stiff competition but these chips were just perfect and not quite so drowned in sauce as some of the others have been. I wandered around while eating my yummy friets and had a quick look at some of the highlights of Haarlem (most are within 50 metres of the church so this isn’t hard) and took a few photos while the light was nice. One thing that I did notice about Haarlem was the incredibly large number of rubbish bins that there are in the streets. Someone on the council obviously has a thing about littering because as soon as you think that you need one, there one is. It’s really quite odd. Then I headed back to the hostel to watch some TV. I’d been looking forward to being able to use the internet but unfortunately the wifi was broken and the only employee who knew what he was doing with it was in China on holidays and was uncontactable so it wasn’t going to get fixed for at least 3 more days. They did look up the weather forecast for me on their computer and it was meant to rain for most of the next day so I made the decision to go to the Hague for the day rather than the tulip farm. You can read about my trip to the Hague in the separate entry.

In the morning, the weather was nice, if a little chilly so I wandered very quickly around the main square and took some pictures with a sort of blue sky in the background before heading back up to the station to go to the Hague. One great thing that they have in Haarlem is double racks for the bicycles at the station. You pull the rack down and lock your bike onto it and then hoist it back up onto the top so they can park twice as many bikes in the same amount of space. Very neat idea!

In the evening, I didn’t get back to Haarlem until nearly 6pm so headed straight out for dinner. Lots of places were fairly full so I ended up in a large restaurant near the square called Pasta di Mamma (I think it’s a chain). It’s a little odd but the food was good and quick and not too expensive so all in all it was good. I then headed back to the hotel again and another movie in the evening. I love countries that don’t dub their TV.

The next day I was meant to be meeting the Australian woman that I had met in Maastricht for the day but there was some running late and some problems with mobile delays and it just didn’t work out in the end which was a shame. I had waited in the hotel for her to call until 10am before deciding to start without her since I only had the one day in Haarlem and there is quite a bit to see. There is a market in the square between the town hall and the church on a Saturday morning that mostly sells food and flowers which I walked through on my way to the entrance into the church on the otherside.

The church was built in the 14-16^th centuries but has had quite a bit of internal reworking since then. It was originally Catholic but became protestant after 1578. It’s 2 euros to get in and you get a little brochure pointing out the highlights of the interior. It’s now fairly plain on the inside with white walls but they used to be painted and this has been uncovered on some of the pillars.

The church is famous for its enormous organ which I had to admit is really really big. It’s over 30m high and takes up all of one end of the church. It’s baroque and decorated with lots of putti. It was played by Mozart when he did his tour of the Netherlands and its organs.

The entire floor of the church, like most in the Netherlands, is made of gravestones and the whole place was said to stink of decomposing bodies most of the year. No wonder they needed to employ dog hitters to keep the dogs out of the church building. There is a very decorative screen across the front of the choir of the church with lots of carvings on its base. It was built in the gothic times and survived the reformation. It has a very odd carving of a man biting a pillar but I saw this one elsewhere and it’s the symbol of a heretic. No idea why.

The lectern, like many in Western Europe, is a pelican. These are very popular because of the story (from God knows where) of the pelican tearing its own breast to feed its young, which the church associates with the blood of Christ becoming the communion wine and his flesh the host. You can tell that they didn’t have pelicans in Holland.

There are various more fancy graves and a small number of statues and paintings in the few side chapels of the church as well. After the church, I headed down the main street through all the shops towards the museum/art gallery and one of the other churches. I didn’t manage to find that church straight away because it doesn’t have a particularly tall tower and wasn’t quite where the map marks it to be but I made it back there later in the day.

So it was on to the museum which is housed in an old set of buildings that used to be a home for old men and at one stage an orphanage. There were lots of buildings in Haarlem that were for the care of the elderly, homeless and orphans as the town had quite a bit of money at various points. Most of the buildings are now private residences.

The museum starts with a nice simple room that gives some of the history of Haarlem and its industry for those of us that know very little about the Netherlands. Haarlem was a very wealthy city early on but later lost out to Amsterdam. Its main industries were shipping, brewing and making linen. They needed space and water to make the white linens and the dunes near Haarlem were the perfect place for drying the fabric after bleaching. The town was rich but not all the residents. About 75% of the population was on or below the poverty line but the remaining 25 % were very rich indeed.

The art collection has pieces from the gothic period through to the Golden Age and then some 18^th century stuff as well. They have some 18^th century doll houses as well in one of the back rooms which are worth a look at. They must have been very popular at the time because almost every museum has at least one. The museum is also home to the Frans Hals civic guard paintings which are huge and in their own room at the very back of the museum. This genre really does nothing for me but some people might like them.

The special exhibition at the moment is of the collection of a man called Kremer. He is a very rich man through the oil trade and since he was ten has wanted to own a Rembrandt. He became a keen art collector in the 90s and has amassed quite a bit of stuff. He doesn’t display any of it in his house but has loaned it all to museums around the Netherlands. The exhibition in Haarlem is the first time that the entire collection has been together in the one place. For me the highlights were Michael Sweerts’ Young Maidservant, Matthias Stom’s Woman Counting Coins by Candlelight and Abraham’s Janssens’ TheVirgin and Child with the infant St John the Baptist but there are many other good pieces in the collection. And he did get his wish of owning a Rembrandt and for a very good price. He bought a piece that was meant to have come from his studio but it was reassessed and they decided that it had actually been painted by Rembrandt himself.  

I was starving as it was nearly 2pm so I headed up to the square and had fries again from the same place and sat in the sun near the church and ate them. And they were just as good the second time which is a sign of a really good food place.

Afterwards, I headed for the Teyler Museum which is the other big museum in town. And it is just brilliant. It’s definitely somewhere to take kids as they are very kid friendly. While I was there, one of the guards could see that a little girl was having trouble seeing into the cabinets and he went and got her a little fold up stool that she could stand on.

The museum was built to house the collection of Peiter Teyler who lived in Haarlem in the 18^th century. In his will he left the collection and a large amount of money to a foundation to further the sciences in Haarlem. Originally the specimens and equipment were just used in demonstrations and lectures but in the end the foundation decided to build a museum for all the pieces. So it opened in 1784 and is therefore the oldest museum still running in the Netherlands. Since then they have had to do a couple of renovations to increase the display space as the collection has grown and most of the building is from the 19^th century. They still display everything as it was then. The building is lovely with a large entrance hall with a dome and then all the display rooms behind it. The rooms are mostly naturally lit and filled with large glass display cases.

It starts of with two rooms full of fossils and minerals including the mosasaurus from St Petersberg in Maastricht and several human skulls. They have a really good collection of insect and bird fossils as well. Then there is a room full of scientific equipment including the spectacular electrostatic generator. This was built for an expo and creates electricity by spinning of glass wheels. The electricity then moves through a series of metal balls until it builds up enough voltage to jump through to the separate metal ball. With the plates being spun at full speed, the machine can create a bolt of lightning of 330,000 volts. They would have wanted to be wearing rubber shoes!

The display cases on either side show various equipment from the different fields of science like optics, audiometrics, physics and chemistry. Next there are a couple of little rooms that show things like fluorescence and optical illusions before you get to the oval room which was the original room in the museum. Upstairs it has books and drawings and downstairs it has more scientific equipment, minerals (including the top of Mont Blanc that someone chipped off while they were there) and a couple of large globes showing the stars and the continents.

It then moves on into drawings, coins and then two rooms full of paintings from the area. The paintings are mostly 19^th century. Teyler was also a keen collector of art. The final set of rooms is for temporary exhibits and is in Dutch only. The free audio guide doesn’t cover this area either. At the moment it is about the use of other cultures for entertainment and looks at the way people thought about Africans, South Americans and Australasians when they were first exposed to them. I’m sure the writing is really interesting and some of the objects are quite incredible and it’s worth a look even if you don’t understand Dutch. There is also a weird video which involves some South Americans dancing around a fire and cooking a shop dummy and I think is something to do with the stories of cannibalism that were brought back to Europe from the New World.

It was still reasonably pleasant when I headed out of the museum and I decided to go in search of the church that I had missed earlier in the day and another church that I could see in the distance from that end of town. The first one was quite dull from the outside and wasn’t open so I continued straight on. The second church was quite a walk away on the very edge of the old town. I headed through a residential area which was really weird because all the houses had large picture windows that were straight onto the street so that you could see straight into their kitchen or living room as you walked past. It was really odd and I don’t think that I could live like that. It doesn’t seem to both them though as they all had their curtains wide open.

The church that I could see is the Cathedral of St Bavo and is the Catholic church that was built in the late 19^th century as the new home for the local catholics. It’s like a giant cake with layer upon layer built around the central dome. Except for the towers at the front which look like they belong on a town hall or a railway station. It kind of works though as a whole (though looks a lot better from the back than the front). Unfortunately, it doesn’t open for visitors until the 1^st of April so I wasn’t able to see inside. I headed back over the canal past the theatre, which has a very nice modern addition to the older building, and into the streets to the side of the main square. This is where most of the town’s hofje are but they were all closed. Hofje are little courtyards that have houses built around them and some of them have very lovely gardens that you can go and visit but obviously not in March. I started to look for something for dinner and was surprised to find that most of the takeaways and similar were shut even though it was only just after 6pm. I’m not sure if this is a regular thing or whether people were just shut for the soccer (The Netherlands vs Scotland was on that evening). It took me quite a while to find somewhere that was open and wasn’t a really fancy restaurant as I just wanted something simple. I ended up in an Italian place and had a nice vegetarian pizza before heading back to the hotel to hit the hay. I was tired after a busy week.

Sunday morning, I lost an hour due to the change to daylight savings so didn’t have much time before I headed back up to the station and headed onto Rotterdam. So read on in the next entry.