Haarlem

It costs about half as much to stay in Haarlem as to stay in Amsterdam, which is why we spend our two nights in Holland there. That, and the great sage Rick Steves says that if you have two days to spend in Amsterdam, spend one in the city and one in Haarlem. I know, enough with the Rick Steves already, but I wish I paid even more attention, because he gives the hotel we booked indifferent reviews. There isn’t much wrong with it, except that it’s a bit remote from the train station and breakfast isn’t included, so our 20 minute train ride to Amsterdam Centraal takes longer and cost twice as much because of cab fare and our stay costs more than advertised because of the costly—albeit delicious—morning buffet. That 20 minute commute from Haarlem to Amsterdam would make an excellent bike ride, though, through the beautiful Dutch countryside.

The town of Haarlem, home of Corrie Ten Boom, is like a Dutch Bruges with fewer tourists. After getting past the obvious comparisons with the Harlem of New (Amsterdam) York, the town offers serene walks along the canals, winsome shopkeepers and museum guides, plenty of pedestrian-only areas, and (sniff sniff) a few of the other delights this country is famous for.

The Corrie Ten Boom house, we find by accident, is just off the Grote Market square. A pilgrimage for many, including the Van Dykes, of Boston, who make up the other half of our tour group, the house is restored to look like it may have in those horrible days when she had to hide Jews in a false wall (aka “the hiding place”). Pictures of family and friends line the walls and the piano is in good repair (the Ten Boom family and guests kept busy by singing and staging plays during blackout hours). The refugees in her house certainly led a better life than Anne Frank’s family, 20 minutes away by train. Fun at night and sun during the day (an enclosed area on the roof allowed them to sit outside unobserved from the street below—or the Gestapo headquarters 200 meters down the road), they were the ones taking heroin from clean needles. Corrie Ten Boom’s story during the war is compelling, and her thirty years of charity work and evangelism after speak to the passion alive inside her. She died on her birthday, as did so many other saints.

Also highly recommended is the Adriaan Molle (or, you know, the big windmill). It’s reconstructed in the old style, with wooden pegs keeping the all-wood gears, pulleys, shafts, and brakes together. We learn how the position of the sails sent messages across the town and how they can turn the turret to face directly into the wind, and enjoy the warmth of all-wood construction after spending so many months living in marble. We also have a wonderful view of the town and the yachts sailing up and down the main canal.

Within sight of the windmill is a playground on the banks of the canal. For a sitting fee of fifty cents, we eat our packed picnic of cheese and fresh bread, tomatoes and olives and an inexpensive merlot. Aryn plays and plays as the sun trickles through the boughs of a great willow tree.

As the sun sets, Aryn settles into bed and Julie rests her legs in the bath with her book. Jake and I have a drink and discuss the incredibly long twilight this far north. The conversation turns, as it does when someone like me talks with someone like Jake, to politics, poverty, development, literature, economics, God, and Garrison Keillor. Someone once told me that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. I took issue with it then, and I still do. Not because ideas aren’t discussed by great minds, but because it implies that an amiable and edifying conversation among friends about this person’s pregnancy or that person’s recent trip to Barcelona is somehow inferior to an angry and divisive dispute about integrating Muslim immigrants into European society or whether six-day Creationism is the only possible interpretation of Genesis. Here’s an idea: edifying conversation among lifelong friends strengthens the most important thing in heaven or on earth—our relationships. Discuss.

So thanks, @Jacob Steele, for the conversation and the memories. May we meet again soon in another corner of this wide world.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam has an interesting personality. The pot and sex tourism color the whole of the city center.

“Why do they have to play it up so much?” asks Jake, my friend from school who is interning with an NGO in Brussels and also the impetus for our trip to Benelux. “Why can’t it just be like, ‘pot and prostitution are legal here,’ and that’s it?”

Money, I imagine, if the swarms of hairy hippies humping their backpacks off the train with a wild excitement in their soon-to-be-glazed eyes are any indication of the scale of its share of this city’s tourism.

“I just think they’re selling themselves short,” Jake concludes.

“Not entirely my favorite city,” Julie agrees, as we dodge every conceivable form of transportation: bus, tram, taxi, construction truck, bike, bike with huge box on the front like a wheelbarrow with pedals, and bike rickshaw.

Our concierge in the hotel in Haarlem agrees. “You were in Amsterdam?” he asks us as we check out. When we nod, he snorts, “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

We visit the NEMO science museum (which looks like the prow of a huge ship sunk in the canal), hoping for an awesome toddler-geared exhibit. We are disappointed—first by the amount of kids there, then by the target age of about 8+. Aryn lacks the patience required by the exhibits, and we don’t linger. The VOC Amsterdam, an old Dutch East India ship collocated with the NEMO, is more exciting. Aryn, aka “captain Jessie,” a riff on her current adopted character from Toy Story, learns to fire a cannon, steer the ship, and cook and eat the hardtack and gruel enjoyed by the ship’s crew. The captain’s mess has roasted chickens and wine in bottles shaped to be very bottom-heavy. She loves it and doesn’t want to leave.

We walk. She falls asleep.

It turns out to take less time to walk back to the Centraal station from the NEMO than it did to ride the bus. Most of the city center is like that. Better, even, to take a bike, which we do later.

But Julie yet again proves her skill at locating the best café. Note: in Amsterdam, “Coffee shops” sell pot, and cafes are cafes. We sit amidst a record market and watch old metalheads browse the vinyl discs for buried treasure. The sun, surprisingly blazing, kisses their grateful northern European skin. We came north to flee you, sun, but the breeze is cool and the Amstel cold and much is right in the world.

Our walk, unexpectedly, takes us through that staple Amsterdam walking experience: the Red Light District. Shine on, sun.

Julie gasps, “There’s a naked woman in that window!”

I smile. I’m happy she gets to see this, and I say “I’m happy.”

“You’re happy about this?” she asks, with her uncanny ability to cut through equivocation. “You think these girls are willing?”

Well some are, of course, but I remember that it was on a previous trip to Amsterdam that I was first awakened to the world of human trafficking.

“It’s got to be better here,” Jake offers, “with regulation, enforced condom use, access to healthcare…”

“Like using heroin from a clean needle, you mean?”

“No, I mean the regulation should keep the trafficking and exploitation side down.”

But when I stayed with the YWAM guys in the “Jesus loves you” building overlooking Centraal station and we discussed their ministry, they told me, “If a prostitute ever accepts Jesus, we have to get her out of town immediately, or she’ll be killed.”

And, in fact, Amsterdam is one of the top destination cities in the world for human trafficking. While it is difficult to know which women initially chose to work in the sex industry, seventy-five percent of the prostitutes are foreign (most from countries identified as “source countries” in Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia). Routine medical checkups are not required. The U.S. Department of State confirms 909 trafficking victims in 2009 (that’s one for every 18,091 people in the country, as compared to 1 per 182,343 in the U.S. and 1 per 118,221 in Thailand), and in 2007 and 2008 the government prosecuted and convicted 152 traffickers with an average sentence of 15 years.

When a Christian organization called Scharlaken Koord (in English, the Scarlet Cord) surveyed 439 prostitutes they had contact with, 380 had been introduced into the business by a supposed “lover” or boyfriend. That sounds a great deal like the classic tale of a trafficking victim: an offer to a desperate citizen in a poor land that sounds too good to be true, and it is. Upon arrival in their promised land, they are informed of the massive debt they now owe (transportation and visa costs, etc.), and they must work off their debt however their captor demands. Usually this debt comes with crushing interest, making it impossible for the victim to ever pay down the debt at all, and they die in captivity. The two competing gangs of pimps in Amsterdam are known for seducing new talent into the profession, so one can conclude that the majority of the prostitutes here are, in fact, slaves. Roxanne, you DO have to sell your body to the night.

We walk.

The mood passes. We ride our bikes out of the Amsterdam of snickering pothead fantasies. We cross canal after canal, the houseboats quietly moored to city streets. Every street has a red bike lane, and we stay safely in our lane and accelerate. I hear Aryn over the wind and the traffic, “Be careful daddy! Mas dispacio.” We discover the magic of the Museumplein, a giant square surrounded by the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum with huge “I amsterdam” letters we could climb on and a playground—plenty of people but plenty of space. We ride from there to the Vondelpark. A park within a great city is one of life’s finest things. The feeling not quite of herbs and stewed rabbit, but rather of calm amidst a lively chaos, of plunging beneath the surface in a waterpark, refreshes like an acre in the country never does (or, one wonders, never has to??).

Dinner under the NYSE and other financial buildings a few blocks from Centraal station is an urban dream. Initially unsure about the food, thinking a place with such incredible outdoor ambiance couldn’t excel also in the kitchen, we are surprised by an outstanding dinner of couscous salad, tomato and red pepper soup and a cheese plate with that rich, northern European bread. Also beer, and another order or two of fries (how many is that today?). Aryn chases the pigeons as we pass the plates around, savoring a fine meal in the mild evening air. Big banks, drugs, human trafficking, heaps of dreadlocked Rastas on the Haj, and I’m still in love with edgy Amsterdam.

Brugge

We had to buy our tickets last minute, but thankfully flying to Brussels from Rome was the cheapest flight I could buy for those dates. So we land in Brussels after an easy drive up to Rome Ciampino, where the parking lot is closer to the gate than the check-in counter is at FCO. Also the airport code is CIA, and the first syllable sounds like “champ,” and I think that’s awesome.

Sitting on the train from Brussels to Bruges, we both comment how similar the countryside is to Wisconsin. The buildings, of course, retain that European flavor—that distinct foreignness to remind us again that (pinch) we’re in Europe, in Belgium. Deciduous trees growing in thick, rich soil brings a feeling of home while the thin, watery sunlight is a welcome relief from a Mediterranean August.

The Flanders hotel, in Brugge, is the best hotel we’ve stayed in yet. The beds are soft, the breakfast enormous, the pool sufficient for a windmill-weary three-year-old who left her house at 8 and took a series of cars, airplanes, buses, trains and taxis before sitting in a stroller for a while.

Our sunset windmill walk calms Julie’s and my frenetic pulse. Julie falls in love immediately. Old historic Bruges has a trail along the surrounding canal, and on the north eastern path you find four giant windmills all in a row. A lawn stretches between them, inviting picnics, Frisbee or, today, a group of dog lovers exercising their pets.

How much is our impression of a place colored by the weather? London, in the sunlight, like when we visited, is unspeakably amazing. Pisa, in the rain, was worth a few pictures and a swift exeunt stage left. Brugge, with her cool summer showers, horse-drawn carriage rides past “God haus”-es where medieval nobility provided free lodging to peasants willing to pray them into heaven, sunny boat rides beneath the bridge leading to the swan-filled convent Julie will join if I break our agreement and die first, and her winding streets filled to overflowing with chocolate, waffles, beer, French fries, and chocolate, ranks easily among our new favorite places on earth. We are definitely in the right place at the right time.

Rick Steves told me that Bruges is a touristy place where you don’t mind rubbing elbows with a bunch of other tourists. If I do nothing more with this blog than to validate the recommendations of this incomparable traveler, from where I sit that would be okay. For you, dear reader, if that happens, just go watch his PBS shows.

About half the streets are bumpy stroller rides. The convent I mentioned earlier is open to visitors, but Aryn is sleeping and the cobblestones are too uneven to stroll through. So if I die and Aryn is grown, you can go visit Julie there and see for yourself. You may not recognize her, because she’ll have gained about 200 lbs by the time you catch up with her, and she’ll probably have finished the whole chocolate statue of Barack Obama.

Our dinner, at an Irish pub staffed by real Irishmen, is fantastic. They serve us delicious food with salad such as we haven’t had in quite some time. My Leffe beer has a pleasant aftertaste, the fries (a food invented in Belguim, which is why we call them French fries) are divine, and the whole culinary experience is totally lost on Aryn. But she manages to eat enough to “earn” dessert (parents, don’t judge me), and wouldn’t you believe it, the chocolate mousse steals the whole show. We have to physically restrain our child so she doesn’t inhale it so fast she chokes, and I have to strain myself to remember much else about that dinner, so consumed is my mind with swimming in that heavenly confection.