Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Haarlem streetrotting; Pootering around; Food; More fotos; & English & Dutch.

 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.
A windmill. Adriaan's, in fact

Finally, one of the several enclosed private gardens of the town. Opinion seems divided on whether these were originally for the distressed women of the parish, spinsters or whores. Possibly all three at the same time.


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.

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