Double Dutch

Business or Pleasure?

It's been eleven years since I was last in Europe and that was only a three-day stop-over on my way to much wilder adventures in West Africa. I spent a three days in Amsterdam seeing the top-level sights and experiencing a culture which was only very moderately foriegn. While Amsterdam is a major world city with more culture and urban excitement than you can shake a stick at, my favorite part of the whole visit was a bike tour along the banks of the Amstel River through the fields and countryside. This time over, I decided to stick to the smaller cities and countryside.

Haarlem

Nifty art deco Haarlem Centraal.

The Spaarne river in Haarlem.

Nowhere in the Netherlands is very far from anywhere else, so to keep my options open, I spent Friday and Saturday nights in Haarlem, a modest sized city adjacent to the overwhelming bustle of Amsterdam. Haarlem has it's own set of tourist attractions including a big cathedral (the Grotekerk or St. Bavo's Church), a picturesque main square (the Grotemarkt), some good museums, and typical old-world charm. I stayed in the minimalist but extremely friendly Hotel Maltz on Zijlstraat a few blocks from the Grotemarkt while I recovered from the jet lag and got my bearings. Besides just wandering around town a lot, I visited the great Teyler's Museum, the Frans Hals Museum, and St. Bavokerk.

The famous Oval Room at the Teyler's Museum.

Haarlem's Grotemarkt on market day (Saturday).

Teyler's is a fascinating collection from back in the day when gentlemen natural philosophers would collect all manner of things in the name of science. It features two rooms of fossils arranged in a charming pre-Darwinian scheme, a room of scientific aparati, a room of flourescent rocks, a room of old coins and medals, and two rooms crammed full of Dutch Masters' paintings. The highlight of the place is the Oval Room (which used to house the entire collection) and now has a highly-catalogued hodge-podge of items of interest to 18th century natural philosophers (including a stone supposedly from the summit of Mont Blanc).

St. Bavo's.

The huge organ inside St. Bavo's and a portion of the tesselated wood and beam ceiling.

St. Bavoskerk is the large 15th-century church which commands the city in a very gothic style. It's not as large or ornate as some of the European showpiece cathedrals, but it's still impressive enough. I'm not a religious man, but I love big churches and thundering pipe organs. Much to my delight, St. Bavo's has a massive 5000-pipe organ taking up the west wall which was being played while I looked around. Awesome!

The main tourist draw for Haarlem is probably the Frans Hals Museum which I visited on Sunday. I appreciate "Old Masters" art as much as the next guy, but it's always a bit of a challenge to really appreciate any serious art museum. Frans Hals was very well done: not too much, and a good variety of artists and subjects and a nicely-written booklet covering much of the collection. The first room gives some great historical perspective that really let me understand the paintings in context. The highlight, of course, were the half-dozen paintings by Frans Hals himself who specialized in huge, realistic depictions of groups of soldiers.

The Frans Hals Museum

Paintings by the man himself.

Nationaal Park Zuid-Kennemerland

Zuid-Kennermerland is not a huge tourist draw and I wasn't able to find much information about it beforehand. Various locals set me toward biking out to Overveen where I could connect to the National Park trails. Once I got my bearings, figured out which paths I could and couldn't bike on ('fietspad'!), and found a decent map I could take a photo of, I spent a lovely couple hours biking through tall trees and surprisingly large dunes on the shore of the North Sea. All this was done on a single-speed, coaster-brake, cruiser bike which took a mile or two to really get used to.

Riding the dunes in Zuid Kenemmerland.

I'm not sure what the signs were about, but the yellow line at the top is sea level.

Highland cattle amongst the dunes.

After an hour of cruising through the dunes, I was very much looking forward to getting a look a the North Sea. Finally, I started up a long and surprisingly steep (for Holland at least) hill. "Man, the view from up here is going to be great!" I thought. Topping out I was greated not by panoramic views, but by the beach! It's hard to come to grips with the fact that significant parts of this country are below sea level.

I worked my way south from Parnassiastraand to Zandvoort and half-way to Noordvijk, inadvertently had lunch at a nudist beach, and then turned inland to following roads and paths through the flower fields back to Haarlem. It was too late to see the flowers, but they must be astonishing in April. Finally, weary and sunburned, I dove back into city traffic and surrendered my trusty bike after 50k of riding.

I was eager to explore the forest and dunes a bit more, so I came back Sunday morning for a run. I quickly found a maze of paved trails through the dense forests near Overveen--Brouwerskolk Park, as it turns out--then wandered over to run the sandy trails of Kennermerduinen. As often happens on my exploratory runs, a "mellow hour" turned into a rather tough 90 minute, 8+ mile trip, but it was still lovely.

Leiden

Still, I managed various adventures while in the area. The Lorentz Center maintains a fleet of nice orange bicycles which they rent out for a nominal fee which were great for commuting to and from the hotel and getting into town occasionally. Case in point, Monday evening, I and a number of other conference attendees followed my native friend Arjen on a hell-bent-for-leather ride into the center of town through narrow, non-orthogonal streets, dodging rush-hour traffic (both cars and bikes). It was pretty exciting until we got the hang of it.

The Lorentz Center. Yes, it's supposed to be tilted like that.

It can't be emphasized enough how crazy the Dutch are for bikes. This is a very small section of the parking area at the train station.

I ate and drank well while in Leiden. Most conferences have an organized Conference Dinner at some point and this one had two. The first (Tuesday evening) was a scenic cruise on the rivers and canals around Leiden with great views of windmills, polders, and all manner of cows. It's very strange to see that the fields adjacent to the canals are a meter or two lower than water level. Wednesday night, I got to try the biking-into-town trick again, this time for dinner with Richard and Nina, astronomers recently in Boulder and now living in Leiden.

Requisite picturesque windmill from our dinner cruise. Note the polders (dry parts) are lower than the canals (wet parts).

There is a high correlation of astronomers and beer conosoiurs. We were all glad to discover Lemmy's.

Thursday night was the second conference dinner, this time a barbeque out on the beach in the town of Katwijk. The weather was fantastic, so four of us hopped on our bikes and rode the five miles out, arriving hungry and thirsty... which was a good thing since the venue featured a great selection of Belgian beers and good company in which to drink them. Intent on more good beer and fellowship, we biked back to town at dusk and met up with Arjen again at Lemmy's, a surpassingly excellent bar in the depths of Leiden with a fantastic selection of hard-to-find-in-the-USA beers. Twas a good night!

Friday, everyone was pretty saturated after a long and fruitful meeting, so we made the trek in to Amsterdam. It's been eleven years since I was there and I'd forgotten the utter madhouse the city is, especially within a mile of Centraal and on a Friday night. Still, I was surprised how much of my way around I remembered and we had a nice time wandering the streets of what is undoubtedly a world-class city, before having yet another excellent dinner at a small place off the Spui.

One of the old city gates.

Typical canal scene in Leiden.

The De Valk mill towers over one of the main entrances to Leiden from the train station.

Inside De Valk. The Dutch are a thrifty people and don't believe in wasting more room than necessary on stairways.

The 12th-century Burcht at the center of town.

In St. Peters, the monument to John Robinson. He's definitely dead.

I occupied myself much of the day just cycling around town, soaking up the Euro-ambience, and shopping for various souvenirs. A nice dinner of traditional Dutch pancakes at an outside cafe in the Breestraat overlooking the canals rounded out the day. I regretfully returned my bike to the Lorentz Center, then walked back to my room to begin the daunting task of packing.

Coming Home

Hats off to the many Dutch people I met in my travels (in the later morning and beyond). They are universally friendly, outgoing, and all speak perfect English. Coincidence or not, their language is really hard even to manage, even mangled. It was a very strange feeling to be able to talk to anyone I pleased, but not understand the street signs or directions they gave you. I spent quite a while on my bike wanderings being moderately lost... but that is half the fun.

Traveling all day in various airplanes and trains, breathing recycled air and listening to recycled sounds is a soul-sucking endurance event, and I was definitely looking forward to being home. However arduous, it's amazing that one can wake up in one country and go to sleep in another a third of the way around the world with nice views of the southern tip of Greenland on the way. It was a great trip both professionally and recreationally, but was very very nice to come home and see my family and my familiar bed again.

Adventure Library

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