Then we went to the Saturday food market in the square by the Grote Kerk. This was not quite like the farmers’ markets at home. While there was some locally grown produce, there were also oranges (the Netherlands may have the House of Orange reigning there, but they have no orchards of orange growing there), squeezed into juice as we watched. There were stands selling cheeses, stands selling sausages, stands selling french fries (with your choice of ketchup or mayonnaise), even stands selling herring to eat raw. Eating raw herring is not something you see done in Minnesota, at least not in public. I didn’t actually see anyone do this there in the market in Haarlem—I thought it would be impolite to stop and stare. But I have it on good authority that this feat is actually done, and not by dolphins or trained seals.
We walked to the Tourist Information office and asked the man there for some ideas as to what to do in Haarlem, especially relating to music, organ music in particular. As we already knew, there was a series of concerts on the great organ of the Grote Kerk on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Unfortunately, we were there only on a Saturday and Sunday. That afternoon there would be a concert with a wind ensemble, and that evening there would be a vespers service, but the only organ involved would be the small choir organ. He didn’t know if the main organ would be used at the 11 a.m. Sunday church service and couldn’t reach anyone at the church, by phone, to find out. But there would be a concert that afternoon at 3:00 at the Catholic Cathedral.
He gave us a couple of self-guided walking tour brochures, one for city monuments and the other for the almshouses: courtyards surrounded by small townhouses, built over the centuries by charitable wealthy people in order to house widows or other worthy poor people. They are now nice, privately-owned homes. He circled on a map those almshouses that would be open today. None of these courtyards would be open to the public on Sunday, so we would have to see them today.
Haarlem is a pleasant, prosperous-looking town. Originally, it was across a large lake, the Haarlemmer Meer, from Amsterdam, but that was filled in long ago. In the seventeenth century, when the Dutch had a colony in America, while the capital was Nieuw Amsterdam, at the southern end of Manhattan Island, there was also a village named after Haarlem, at the northern end.
Included with our tourist information was a voucher for free coffee or tea at the La Place restaurant on the top floors of the V&D department store, right across the street from the Tourist Information office. We decided to use it before setting out on our self-guided tour. Rick Steves mentions La Place as the place to get the best view out over Haarlem. We had our coffee and a pastry on the top floor, looking over to the Grote Kerk, which was like a big ship floating on a sea of rooftops.
We went back to the market square by the Grote Kerk, to start our almshouse walking tour, but while we were passing the church, we heard what sounded like organ music coming from inside. Perhaps someone was practicing! We were going to visit the Grote Kerk anyway at some point, so we might as well do so when we could hear some music.
There are two entrances to the church: on the south side of the nave is the entrance for people attending church services. On the north side, running through the gift shop, is the tourist entrance. In the shop, we bought our tickets, and a few gifts, and asked about the music we had heard (not, it turned out, the organ, but, rather the wind ensemble, practicing for that afternoon’s concert) and whether the great organ would be played at the Sunday service (yes).
So we entered the medieval gothic Cathedral of St. Bavo. Since the reformers didn’t believe in the veneration of saints, after the Reformation the newly Protestant churches in the Netherlands tended to be given purely utilitarian names, such as "Old Church," "New Church," "East Church," "West Church" or "Great Church." But apparently people still called this church "St. Bavo," because now signs, posters, etc., all call it the "Great Church or St. Bavo." This was not the only ambivalence shown about the church’s pre-Reformation history. The reformers had destroyed the church’s statues and whitewashed its walls. Recently some of that whitewash had been taken off, to show some of the brightly colorful decoration.
As we entered, a large wind ensemble was indeed practicing in the choir, surrounded by the carved wooden stalls. This provided a pleasant background as we walked around, following the detailed tour in the Rick Steves book. Towering over the rear of the church was the great 18th-century organ—not, unfortunately, being played.
When we left, the idea was to look at some of the almshouses, however, the weather forecast for our two days in Holland had been simple: rain. It wasn’t a constant rain, but rather an all-day on-and-off scattering of showers, mostly brief and light, but occasionally intense. I had brought along an umbrella, but all Mary Joy had was a hooded windbreaker. Seeing an umbrella stand full of umbrellas for sale in front of a gift shop, she went in and came out carrying a red and blue umbrella with a picture of tulips and "HOLLAND" in big letters. The shop owner had also suggested strongly that we visit the Corrie ten Boom House. There would be an hour-long tour there at 1:30.
During the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, the devoutly religious Corrie ten Boom and her father and sister hid Jews and resistance fighters behind a fake wall in her bedroom. They were betrayed to the Gestapo and arrested, and only Corrie survived the resulting imprisonment. After the war, she wrote a book about her experiences, The Hiding Place, which was turned into a movie. I had heard of her, but didn’t know much about her.
We decided to visit the house (open only by hour-long tour), which would mean first eating a quick lunch in the market. We bought some "English pies": small pot pies that you can hold in your hand while eating. I had a Thai chicken curry pie; I forget what Mary Joy had. We also got some fresh-squeezed orange juice.
Then we went to the Corrie ten Boom House, but it turned out that the 1:30 tour was Dutch-language. There was an American family there (father, mother and two or three young kids), patiently waiting for the two o’clock English language tour, even as the 1:30 group went inside. But we couldn’t wait, without missing the organ concert at the Catholic cathedral.
Instead, we continued our almshouse tour, eventually working our way toward the cathedral, which was across the canal from the Old Town, to the southwest. On the way, we stopped in at the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), the first church in Haarlem to be built as a Protestant church, in 1645. There were people there answering questions about the church and, in Mary Joy’s case, about the organ, on which someone was now practicing. It is a not very large baroque organ, which had been the organ in the Grote Kerk before the current one was installed in 1738. But we didn’t have a lot of time to stay and listen.
The Cathedral of St. Bavo is a large, romanesque church, with two tall towers and an even taller dome, built between 1895 and 1935. Apparently, the Catholics decided that if the Protestants were so ambivalent about naming their Grote Kerk after Saint Bavo, the name was fair game to be reclaimed by its previous owners.
The organ concert, by Hayo Boerema, from Rotterdam, was terrific. I forget what the first piece was. The second was a wonderful improvisation. The last piece was the Organ Symphony Number 6 of Louis Vierne—very difficult, but Mary Joy was impressed with how well he played it.
Afterwards, dodging rainshowers, we finished tracking down almshouses on the map. The almshouses are varied enough and pleasant enough, with their garden courtyards, to be interesting.
We went back to the cathedral for the 7 p.m. mass. We arrived about ten minutes beforehand, but the doors weren’t open yet and only a handful of people were gathered there. Eventually, the priest showed up and opened the doors. People were joking with him about (apparently) how late he was. We all went into the choir, and after a few minutes for the priest to vest himself, mass began. Including us, there were only twenty-three people in the congregation, mostly over the age of seventy. This was one of only two weekend masses at the largest Catholic church in a city of 150,000 people. The other mass would be the 11 a.m. Sunday high mass, presumably presided over by the bishop, so no doubt there would be many more people there, but still, it was clear that the Netherlands wasn’t exactly the same as Mexico or Poland as far as religious fervor was concerned.
For dinner, we went to one of the recommendations in the Rick Steves guide, Jacobus Pieck Eetlokaal. This is a small, cozy, family friendly place: there was a family group, including very young children, at a nearby table. The food, beer and venue weren’t as artsy as at the Jopen Kerk, but they were good enough, and good value.
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