HAARLEM
STREETTROTTING
The bikes
are not the most dangerous things on the pavements of Haarlem's
'pedestrianised' areas. This honour goes to the scooters. There are
quite a lot of these and they're almost as quiet as the bikes. But
they do have the advantage of a horn, as I discovered when I walked blithely into the path of one yesterday morning.
Both the
bikes and the scooters clearly need to be protected from thieves, as
you can see from this picture:-
This chain
is quite heavy-duty but it doesn't compare with that of one worried
owner, which would've been equally useful as an anchor chain. If I
see it again, I'll post a foto.
POOTERING
AROUND
This is a must-see shop in central Haarlem. OK, it belongs to a friend but it's
still something you shouldn't miss, if you like to pooter.
Stadsjutter I translate as 'Streetcomber' but, doubtless, Mr
Peter Missler of Santiago will disagree. As he always does. It's in
his DNA, as everyone says these days.
FOOD
This town
boasts one of the best Indonesian restaurants in Holland – De Lachende Javaan
– and on Saturday night a group of us treated ourselves to a
magnificent rijtstaffel of about 20 separate dishes. An incomparable
way of eating, taking me right back to my Jakarta days.
SIGHTS
A Few more
fotos:
Knights jousting. I'm told. |
And the gardens of a house built for the Teyler family.
Well worth
visiting are the Teyler and Frans Hals museums. As I walked
round the latter, admiring the huge skill of the masters, I got
angrier and angrier about the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.
But that's just me. You might like these puffed-up impostors. I even bought some postcards of etchings of winter scenes. Normally I just run through the inescapable shop.
FINALLY . . . ENGLISH
AND DUTCH
I noted
this description below one lovely etching: Winterlandschap in penseel
en bruine inkt. See if you can work out what it means. I suspect
that, if the Dutch could make their spelling a bit easier for us to
cope with, it might not be too difficult to learn their lovely
language. I'm already quite adept as the hawking aspect. But this, admittedly, is the easy bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment