This was one of the two train trips for which I had gotten tickets in advance, online, before leaving home: nine euros apiece for the fast train to Venice. The efficient thing to do would be to get off the train in Mestre, and there catch the bus to Treviso Airport, instead of going all the way to Venice, walking across the bridge from Santa Lucia Station to Piazzale Roma, and catching the same bus at its starting point. But while getting off at Mestre would cut forty minutes off our travel time, all that extra time, and substantially more, would be spent waiting at the Mestre railroad station, while if we went on to Venice, there would be less waiting around and what there was would be in Venice. Granted, we wouldn’t have time to do anything except sit in Piazzale Roma, but we would still have a glimpse of the Grand Canal, and the idea of waiting for a lengthy period anywhere, much less at the Mestre station, did not appeal to Mary Joy at all. Mestre, straight across the bridge on the mainland, is technically a part of the municipality of Venice. But it is about as un-Venice as a place can be: a large, gritty industrial port city, to which most former Venetians have migrated, in search of jobs and cheaper rents.
So once again I bought bus tickets at the ATVO shop on Piazzale Roma, while Mary Joy sat in the small, shady park, watching our bags. We caught our bus, and after a forty-minute ride we were at Treviso’s tiny airport. The principal airline flying in and out of there is Ryanair, the quintessential budget airline, whose CEO had speculated about charging to use the planes’ toilets. But given how planes are built, that had proven to be impossible. We have flown Ryanair several times, but on this day we would be flying Transavia, another budget airline, headquartered in the Netherlands.
We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. In fact, with more time than we had expected, since our plane was late arriving, and we ended up leaving about an hour-and-a-half late.
When we finally got to the point of waiting in line at the gate, I made an interesting observation. Most women in Italy, in this very hot weather (which was supposed to break the day after we left), wore sandals or open-toed shoes, and most of these women had painted their toenails. Most of the women waiting in this line to fly to Amsterdam also wore sandals, but only a few of them had painted toenails. Was this due to a Calvinist disdain for worldly show? More likely, the climate in the Netherlands was such that women there didn’t have much opportunity to display their toes. I refrained from mentioning this observation to Mary Joy, who was already pining for sunny Italy, even though we hadn’t yet left it.
Interestingly, the plane itself, when it arrived, was a big sky-blue and white KLM plane (instead of Transavia’s green, blue and white), with a little plate near the door that said: “Operated by Transavia Airlines.” When we got to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, it was treated as a KLM flight on the baggage carrousel notice.
The flight itself was uneventful, though our luggage ended up being nearly the last off the plane. The big train station is right next to the terminal. Rather than try to sort out our route on one of the ticket machines, I decided to go to the ticket counter, even though electronic signs there kept warning us that it would cost half a euro more than the machine. We got our tickets to Haarlem, including return tickets for the following Monday, and a suggested itinerary--we were actually able to do better than that suggestion by catching a train that was just about to leave for Amsterdam Central Station.
But we weren’t going all the way downtown. Instead, after a few minutes we would change trains at Amsterdam Sloterdijk station, and a few stations later we would get off at Haarlem. Haarlem is a city of 150,000 or so inhabitants, twenty minutes by train west of Amsterdam. Not far beyond is the beach resort of Zandvoort, on the North Sea. There is one principal reason why an organist like Mary Joy would want to stay in Haarlem rather than in Amsterdam: one of the world’s great organs, the 1738 Christian Muller organ in the Grote Kerk (Great Church). Mozart played on it when he was ten years old. In addition, Haarlem is recommended by Rick Steves (himself a pianist) in his Amsterdam guide as a home-base alternative “giving you small-town warmth overnight, with easy access (twenty minutes by train) to wild-and-crazy Amsterdam during the day.”
So we arrived in Haarlem a little after eight in the evening and walked to the Hotel Die Raekse and checked in. Since we were substantially later than expected, they had just charged our Visa card for our three-night stay (I had sent them the card number when I reserved the room). Steves says that it’s a family-run hotel, and, indeed, we saw the same two people (presumably husband and wife) there all the time.
Steves had warned that restaurant hours in the Netherlands were more like those in the U.S. than in Italy or Spain, so we were worried that we might not find a place to eat at this hour. However, our hosts reassured us that there were several restaurants open now, just down the street: one Japanese, one Italian and one Dutch.
There is no elevator in the hotel and the number one negative that people complained about on Tripadvisor was how steep the stairs were. They were right. These stairs were much steeper and narrower than the stairs to the choir loft in Mary Joy’s church at home. They almost reminded me of stairs in a medieval castle. Going up them, carrying my roll-on bag while wearing Mary Joy’s big backpack, I almost fell over backwards. But once we got upstairs, our room was large and pleasant.
Once settled, we hurried back down and outside, going a few blocks until we found a square, with restaurants on three sides: a Japanese restaurant, a pizza place, and something called Jopen Kerk. That was a brewpub, with a bar downstairs and a restaurant upstairs, all of it surrounded by big brewing vats. Apparently, Jopen is a company that has been brewing artisan beers locally in Haarlem since the ‘90s, and they had taken over an old church, the Jacobuskerk, put in new stained glass and a décor based on the color red, and called it "Jopen Kerk."
We pleaded ignorance of the language (the menu was entirely in Dutch) and were helped out by two of the waitresses. I ordered fish (plaice?) along with the suggested beer, a lager. Mary Joy had a lamb stew, along with a heavier, darker brew, called Koyt. According to their website, this is made with herbs instead of hops. It had a smoky, chocolatey taste, not quite like any beer I’ve ever tasted. We both liked it very much.
Then we returned to our hotel and went to bed..
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