Day 4 - Haarlem

Haarlem is another town a quick train ride away. It's smaller than Amsterdam and they had a few museums that we wanted to take a look at so we bought a train ticket and headed out. It was Sunday.
Haarlem train station.

When we got there, we found that a lot of the streets around the train station were under construction. We found one of the main streets and headed in toward city center. There wasn't a whole lot open and it was past noon. It didn't occur to me that stuff would be closed. As we walked toward the city center, we began seeing a lot of runners. Then we started hearing crowd noise. Yup, you guessed it. There was a race of some sort going on right in the city center where all the 'stuff' was. It was kind of frustrating because we couldn't even walk around the square because streets were blocked off for the race.


Canal in Haarlem along one of the main streets.
You can see the steeple of St. Bavo's Church. They are supposed to have this amazing pipe organ but we couldn't get inside.

This angle is a little better (except it's cock-eyed). All the flags are for the race. It was the Zilveren Kruis Achmea race. I'm not sure how far - 10k? Wouldn't it have been cool to run a race in The Netherlands! Too bad too. I had my shoes and my shorts. Had I known, I could have joined them. Although, I don't think John would have been too thrilled to wait.
This was one of the buildings along the main road. I thought the doorway looked kind of cool. I would love to have seen what was behind the door. An apartment? A store? What was behind the door a hundred years ago?
St. Bavo's Church - a closer look.
Back at the train station. With all those people around, it was hard to look at anything and really take in the town. We tried to find someplace to eat and had a hard time with that as well so we just gave in and took the train back to Amsterdam.

Once back in the city, we walked around a bit. I was looking for what I thought was some sort of residence that was used by Napoleon's brother but I never found it and I didn't have a definitive plan. What was I thinking? Mostly we walked around randomly and wasted time. In retrospect, we should have "wasted time" at a museum or sitting at a cafe and watching people. My bad.
This was our last night in Amsterdam so we stayed out late like big people and we took a night time canal cruise. The city is really pretty all lit up. The cruise was at 10 pm and it was the same route that we took on the first cruise. Centraal Train Station at night.
The area across the canal from the train station.
A different view of the train station.So one of the things that I've discovered about taking pictures at night is that when they come out, they look awesome. Unfortunately, I have not mastered this art. It's times like this when I wish I'd brought my tripod. None of the pictures I took from the canal cruise came out. They were all blurry.
Something else we learned about these Amsterdammers is that they love their french fries! This is a french fry stand. Yes. An entire stand where all they sell are french fries in this wrap of paper. Most people get them with a huge glop of mayonnaise on them. It still makes me gag thinking of it!

Amsterdam was fabulous! I would go back in a heartbeat. The only thing I would do differently is actually try and go in some of the churches and the other museums. Our hotel was perfectly situated. We were able to walk where ever we needed/wanted to go.