Sunny Haarlem

Well, today with M back in school, I returned to Haarlem. I quite like it there. It is friendly and interesting, and old and hard on the feet. Okay, I didn't like that part so much. My battery on the pedometer was going so I know that I made 4.98 km but I couldn't see the steps. Since then, and with a new battery, I'm at 2456 steps. I'll let you know later what the final is....we are going back to try the rijstaffle tonight, since for various reasons, it didn't work out yesterday.

In Haarlem, I poked around a lot of stores, but bought little. However, I really wanted to see the Corrie ten Boom museum. This is a lady that my grandmother talked about and introduced me to through a book called The Hiding Place. Tomorrow I'll add links to all that, but in this internet cafe at the hotel, ti is too expensive to do. As it turned out, I had a private tour of the museum, and my purchases included a newer copy of the book (as it is getting ahrder to find), and a copy of the dvd (because I really liked it).

This story is the other side of Anne Frank. These people had a lovely comfortable home, in a fashionable district of Haarlem. Corrie was the first female watchmaker in the Netherlands, and was a key player in the Dutch Resistance during the war. As I mentioned on the Anne Frank museum post, I was sure that this hiding place would be much smaller and indeed it was. In fact, this hiding place was the size of my closet in my bedroom at home...and in that place, for example, six people stayed for four days without food or water, and barely daring to breathe. The tenBooms had been betrayed, and while it was known there were people hidden there, they could not be found. They looked in the attic and under the floor--but the man who built the hiding place had the foresight to place bricks further down than the floor line, and that is the reason they were saved. I was shown the window that they eventually escaped out of....and let me tell you how very steep it was from that angle.

I can't possibly fit it all in here (again, expensive place, lack of time) but IO will try to do a longer post later.

And now, I just saw M get back--so it's off to ristaffle for me!

Oh, and why is it called Sunny Haarlem? Today for the first day since our visit, the sun actually shone most of the day. It was darned windy but still...sun!!