Tales of Haarlem

Some notes from our day trip to Haarlem on Sunday, January 16.

Haarlem's Red Light "district" is not much more than a corner. Still, Jeff was eager to walk through it, based on Rick Steves' description of it being as "cute as a Barbie doll." But at 11 on a Sunday morning, there was nothing to see: the whole town was deserted - even the prostitutes were at church - and only a few lonely red lanterns shone over dark and empty windows.

After one block, we were out of the "district" and at yet another canal. As we stood on a bridge taking the requisite Dutch canal photos, a soft "ooooOoo, ooooOoo" emanated from the street we had just left.

"Jeff, can you hear the birds?"

Jeff gave me a "you poor naive child look" and patiently explained, "I think that's someone having sex."

But then the calls shifted to "trrrrroooOoo, trrrrrooooOoo." "No, Jeff," I patiently explained, "those are pigeons. But that's OK, I'm sure there are some people who sound like pigeons when they're having sex."

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Haarlem's museum of science is a time capsule from the 1780s. Fossils and rocks are lined up with handwritten labels in glass cases; an entire room is dedicated to technical equipment that was cutting-edge in the 1800s. (The largest electrostatic generator ever built (1791) looks like part of the set design for the Tesla scenes in The Prestige.)

In the 1930s, a curator added a dark room to demonstrate such exotic attributes as fluorescence and phosphorescence and to show off some Geissler tubes (which look like early precursors to neon signs). It's not magic: it's science.

The museum also houses, somewhat randomly, hundreds of drawings by Michaelangelo and Rembradt, a collection of brilliantly illustrated rare books about wildlife, and "one of the most important collections of coins and medals in the Netherlands" (snore).

And best of all, it was covered by our museumkaart.

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Haarlem loves Frans Hal, a Dutch portrait painter from the country's Golden Age. But my favorite part of the museum dedicated to his large group portraits was the small room that houses the museum's greatest non-Frans treasures: a set of embroidered bed curtains from the 17th century, a giant doll house from the 18th century, and a couple cheeky paintings by two painters with confusingly similar names.

The painting by Jan Breughel the Younger satirizes the tulip bulb craze in Holland in the 1600s, with monkeys buying, trading and "watering" the overvalued plants (see lower right corner). Four hundred years later, not much has changed.

The second, much larger painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger depicts 72 common Dutch sayings, from "pies grow on their roof" (they are well-off) to "grabbing an eel by the tail" (undertaking something bound to fail). This time the scatological humor is located on the far left, with the depiction of that famous Dutch saying, "to shit on the world" (not to give a damn).

It's an eternal truth: bathroom humor sells.