After a couple days with my host family in Winsum, I hopped on a train to Haarlem. Haarlem is my new favorite city. It's about 15 minutes from Amsterdam but a totally different feel. There are gorgeous canals and bridges everywhere. It's bigger than Groningen walking, but there are way fewer people so it has a quiet, summertime feel, as if everyone's gone on vacation. There are cool art deco buildings everywhere and typical squished Dutch city architecture (with the buildings on average only 2 meters wide). I was staying near the Grote Markt, a square with a massive church, St. Bavo, in the middle. The church has at least 25 different little roofs to it, so it actually looks more like a condensed cityscape than one single building. Inside is an organ that Mozart played when he was 10 years old!
I was expecting to have a pretty quiet stay while in Haarlem. I was sick and so I was planning to take it easy and get out to Amsterdam and make day trips but not plan too much into my schedule. That all changed when I met my roommates! The first thing the girl in the bunk above me said to me was,"Sorry about my shoes. I can move them if you want". It was like she had told me a secret password = a Canadian!! She was from Winnipeg and said she missed having people apologize all the time too!
Because I was travelling alone I had put a message on Couchsurfing asking if anyone wanted to meet up and do a tour or grab a drink (mostly to prove to my host parents that I am not a total hermit). So for my second night in Haarlem I had plans at the Jopenkerk (a really cool church that was converted into a brewery and bar). I wasn't sure how many people would be there, so I invited Canada and the rest of the girls in our room to join. We had a blast and ended up doing everything together that week. It was like summercamp. Except more expensive.
On my second full day there I went in search of breakfast and ended up only finding a Starbucks open that early. That was expensive and disappointing until they served me my filter coffee. It was MASSIVE (by european coffee standards) and tasted like home. I nearly cried! I like coffee for the taste more than the caffeine, and so European coffees and espressos don't really cut it. I am so thankful for Starbuckses and McDonalds cafe's when needing an American style coffee fix.
I went from there to the Corrie Ten Boom museum. I read her book, The Hiding Place, in school and although I didn't really like having to read it at the time, this was the museum in all of the Netherlands I was most excited to see. It was so cool! Corrie's father was a watchmaker and jeweler living in Haarlem at the beginning of WW2. The family had a secret room made in Corrie's bedroom and hid people hiding from the Nazi's. The jewelry store came in handy for distracting and disguising their secret activities (they built the secret wall by bringing supplies back and forth inside grandfather clocks saying they needed repairing!) and it's still there, in business, today. Corrie was actually arrested (ironically, not for hiding jews - no one ever found out about the room) and sent to a concentration camp. The entire story is an amazing one and such a good example of her faith. READ IT - it's so cool! My favorite thing about the museum was that it didn't hide her faith or how God used her. The tour guide and most of the other tourists there all talked about it and at the end we read a prayer Corrie had written. I was actually asked to read, even though I had no voice (still sick). It was so cool to know that in the middle of such a liberal, proudly secular country, is a tiny museum showing such an example of faith. It's also right next to a massive H&M, if you're interested. :)
This is already a long post so I will talk about Amsterdam in the next one!
I was expecting to have a pretty quiet stay while in Haarlem. I was sick and so I was planning to take it easy and get out to Amsterdam and make day trips but not plan too much into my schedule. That all changed when I met my roommates! The first thing the girl in the bunk above me said to me was,"Sorry about my shoes. I can move them if you want". It was like she had told me a secret password = a Canadian!! She was from Winnipeg and said she missed having people apologize all the time too!
Because I was travelling alone I had put a message on Couchsurfing asking if anyone wanted to meet up and do a tour or grab a drink (mostly to prove to my host parents that I am not a total hermit). So for my second night in Haarlem I had plans at the Jopenkerk (a really cool church that was converted into a brewery and bar). I wasn't sure how many people would be there, so I invited Canada and the rest of the girls in our room to join. We had a blast and ended up doing everything together that week. It was like summercamp. Except more expensive.
On my second full day there I went in search of breakfast and ended up only finding a Starbucks open that early. That was expensive and disappointing until they served me my filter coffee. It was MASSIVE (by european coffee standards) and tasted like home. I nearly cried! I like coffee for the taste more than the caffeine, and so European coffees and espressos don't really cut it. I am so thankful for Starbuckses and McDonalds cafe's when needing an American style coffee fix.
I went from there to the Corrie Ten Boom museum. I read her book, The Hiding Place, in school and although I didn't really like having to read it at the time, this was the museum in all of the Netherlands I was most excited to see. It was so cool! Corrie's father was a watchmaker and jeweler living in Haarlem at the beginning of WW2. The family had a secret room made in Corrie's bedroom and hid people hiding from the Nazi's. The jewelry store came in handy for distracting and disguising their secret activities (they built the secret wall by bringing supplies back and forth inside grandfather clocks saying they needed repairing!) and it's still there, in business, today. Corrie was actually arrested (ironically, not for hiding jews - no one ever found out about the room) and sent to a concentration camp. The entire story is an amazing one and such a good example of her faith. READ IT - it's so cool! My favorite thing about the museum was that it didn't hide her faith or how God used her. The tour guide and most of the other tourists there all talked about it and at the end we read a prayer Corrie had written. I was actually asked to read, even though I had no voice (still sick). It was so cool to know that in the middle of such a liberal, proudly secular country, is a tiny museum showing such an example of faith. It's also right next to a massive H&M, if you're interested. :)
This is already a long post so I will talk about Amsterdam in the next one!