Harlaam

This morning we decided to eat breakfast at the Christian Youth Hostel where we were staying. Did I not mention that? We found an evangelical Xtian Youth Hostel in the middle of the Red Light District, and who can pass that up? We moved there last night before our bike ride.

The breakfast was a good idea in theory but not in reality. They were serving French toast, but they were serving it one at a time for some reason, so we had to put our names on a list and wait our turn until the Christian Workers made enough toast to feed the people before us. I just thought it was a weird system for a place that can pretty much guarantee at least fifteen breakfast diners a day. Anyways, we put our name on the list and waited at a table with a Christian Worker who had moved from Japan nine years ago and was now married to a Dutch woman. Had I known he was a Christian Worker when I sat down, I would have chosen a different table. I am not into the evangelical types. But I think my mom had a good time chatting with him about her work, about teaching religious studies, CONVENIENTLY leaving out that actually, she teaches a lot of Jewish studies too, and oh! Did we mention that we don't believe in Jesus?

After finally getting breakfast (SO not worth the wait), we took a train to the city of Haarlem, twenty minutes west of Amsterdam. This is the city that Harlem, NY is named after, but let me be the first to tell you, it is NOTHING alike. Haarlem, NL is a small, charming city with cobblestones, a town square, a giant church, and canals. It is the kind of town you expect to see pictures of in museums about old folk life. There was a lot of pretty architecture, much like in Amsterdam, but on a slightly smaller scale. Also, it was sunny (finally!), so it felt a lot more homey.

We visited St. Bavo's Cathedral, which was huge and gorgeous and had an amazing wooden ceiling. Most of those European cathedrals with the high arching ceilings are painted white or have religious iconography, but this one had wood paneling, like a curved hardwood floor. It was quite striking. The floor was also tiled with giant blocks of black stone, each one marked with the name or symbol of the fellow/felless buried beneath. Also charming! St. Bavo's greatest claim to fame is that its organ -- which is huge and shiny and quite impressive in its own right -- was once played by both Mozart and Handel! (Not at the same time.)

Off to the Teylor's Museum of Science and Discovery and Somethingorother. This place was RAD. It was founded in the early 1800s as a source of new knowledge about "science," where Mr. Teylor and his friends could showcase their collections of fossils and gems and telescopes and coins and butterfly prints and newfangled electricity machines ("magic" machines). I saw some phosphorescent rocks and a dodo bird skeleton (which the Dutch successfully made extinct centuries ago), also an elaborate marble roller coaster that poured a cup of tea. My mom's favorite exibit was of a fossilized salamander, which the original discoverer thought was the skeleton of a sinner man who had died in Noah's flood. (The skeleton was two feet long, so maybe they were really short back then?)

Then my mother went off to a boring art museum (I hate old art) while I did internet for the first time. Interneting here in Europe is turing out to be much more difficult than it was in Thailand or Peru. Plus, did you know they use a different keyboard than we do?!?! No QWERTY, it's all messed up.

I got lunch at Burger King (french fries and salad). There is something about being in a foreign country and eating at fast food places I wouldn't TOUCH back home. It's like you miss American grease.

We had grand plans to bike to this nature reserve on the coast (Kennemerdunnen), but the bike shop we rented from (because the first one was mean and wouldn't take a credit card and I just didn't like the guy who worked there) closed early and there was a fear that we wouldn't make it there and back on time, so we decided instead to go to Bloemendaal, a parkish area next to a wealthy neighborhood. What is great about biking in the Netherlands is that not only do they have bike lanes EVERYWHERE, they also have bike stop lights!! There are car stop lights, green yellow red circles, and there are people crosswalk lights, shaped in the sign of a standing boy with loud ticker for the blind (or spacey), and then there are bicycle stop lights, green yellow red little pictures of bicycles. Four days later, these bike lights have not stopped being cute.

Around Bloemendaal, we saw some goats and sheep and fancy houses, and an apartment building labeled "Iben Ha Ezer" which an occupant told us was after Ebenezer Scrooge (we don't believe him and think it could be Hebrew), and then right next to that was a building I could have sworn was labeled "Chabad Haarlem," but after careful inspection turned out to be a Christian primary center. We also stopped at the New St. Bavo's Cathedral, which was built because the original one turned Protestant in the 1600s. Between you and me, this new St. Bavo's has a much cooler exterior. Its steeple tower is a large, roundish, cylindrical, spiraly thing made out of copper that has turned a pleasant shade of green. But we couldn't go inside because it was locked! Those Catholics!

We returned our bikes around six o'clock (mine had started making a funny sound), and I ate my Burger King salad in the town square while watching a man throw around batons of fire. The square was filling with people eating and drinking their evening coffee.

We took a train back to Amsterdam and made some phone calls at the hostel, but left just in time to miss Bible Study to walk through the Red Light District. I had a serious jonesing for a peice of TRIANGULAR, VEGETABLE pizza. After finding a suitable specimen, we packed up at the hostel and my mom took her fancy clothes suitcase to her conference hotel. I took a sleeping pill and slept through the night for the first time.