Magellan Trip : Safe Houses and a Safe Haarlem

Part two of my three part series on the little daytrips my colleague and I took to escape the crowds of Amsterdam took part in Haarlem. Amazingly different from our Harlem, which steals this gorgeous city's name, we spent an entire day without incident. Try doing the same thing walking around our Harlem for hours on end as a tourist, I am sure that the experience would be much different.

So moving on without our mugging, shooting, gang-affiliated visit to the Dutch Haarlem, we visited quite a few sites. My favorite would have to be the De Adriaan Windmill. After all these years, they still use it to mill grain on special occasions and have professional, college-educated millers on staff. Luckily, we also enjoyed the presence of a worldly, humorous, and spontaneous tour guide who managed to educate, engage, amuse, and insult the members of the six person tour group. That combination led to a consistently positive experience in which everyone there was ear to ear grinning. In her questions to the group, I was able to get two answers right from a silent group, one of my correct answers was especially lauded. She said to me that in her decades of doing this, I was only the second or third to give the right answer. So obviously I was flattered. The windmill tour itself was interesting, sure, but without our particular guide I fear that it would not have been the memorable, incredible experience that it was.

First View from out of the train station.

Here are the photos from the De Adriaan Windmill.

Views of the city from the balcony of the windmill.

One of the few prisons in the Netherlands in the background with the dome.

All the different types of wood used to make this windmill.

These pictures are of models of other types of windmills.

The Italian Marble tower that was meant to be part of the St. Braavos Church,but the stone was too heavy and caused the church to sink in the soft Dutch ground, so it was removed and placed there.

Next, we tried to go to the Ten Boom House which is a jewelry store centuries old, whose family harbored enemies of the state during Nazi occupation. The offered free tours at specific times alternating between Dutch and English speaking tour guides. So when we returned at the allotted time,we were walked though the house, told the history of the Ten Booms which were devout Christians who decided to resist the Nazis based solely on a decision of their own faith. Their struggle was chronicled in the book The Hiding Place. Of the entire immediate Ten Boom family, only one member would survive the ordeal after the family had been betrayed and the family was shipped off to concentration camps. The survivor, fervent in her faith, then traveled the world preaching and telling the story of how her family had sacrificed themselves for their faith. In fact, during one of the survivor's sermons about forgiveness, an actual SS guard from Ravensbruck Concentration Camp approached her to thank her for allowing him to finally feel as if he can repent. The tour was interesting, and the acts this family did were amazing. They never had any doubt or regret about what they did. Even while their family was being arrested, and the home raided, the Jews being hidden in the wall were never found by the Nazis. What condemned them to their fate is that forged ration cards and other forged documents were found in a separate hiding place. In fact, the elder patriarch of the Ten Booms was eighty, and in an act of rare generosity the Nazis told him he could remain in his home with no repercussions so long as he vows not to engage in criminal activity again. In response, he said that if they left him there, he would continue to help the Jews until the day he died. So, the Nazis took him, and he died within three weeks in a concentration camp. My only complaint is the preacher tone the tour guide took with the group. It sounded as if I had received a long historical sermon about the glory of Christian charity rather than the heroism of a single family. I cannot count the amount of times the woman had said "the lord Christ, Jesus," and to be perfectly blunt, most of the times it was unnecessary.

The Hiding Place in the Ten Boom House

Entrance to the hiding place.

I also went to another art museum. Forgive me, but at this point I am sorta just going through the motions of art appreciation. They had beautiful works there, no doubt, and I took pictures of those I liked the most, but there is only so much art someone can appreciate in such a condensed period of time. So this time it was the Frans Hal Museum and it was very well presented from within the building of what had formerly been a home for old men. I have little else to say about the place, and pictures say a thousand words, right? So I will have plenty of thousands of words following this.

Finally, we went to the St. Braavos church and the Haarlem Amsterdam Gate, the only remaining gate from what used to be a fully walled city.

Here are all the Frans Hal Museum pictures. Most paintings have the description of what it is immediately after it. Then there are pictures of the house and the house's courtyard (which was incredibly beautiful as you will see.)