a weekend in haarlem

Last weekend a friend who lives in Haarlem had a birthday party. A birthday party with lots of Polish vodka and many many mojitos. Good thing we decided to stay at Stempels just under the shadow of the church and around the corner from the Grote Markt.

It's a very charming hotel - Hastens beds, really nicely designed rooms, lovely showers and the sound of the church bells to wake you up in the morning. The only downside really was that they are a new hotel and so the attention to detail isn't quite what it could have been. The cutlery at breakfast was dirty and the breakfast room wasn't replenished properly. Breakfast is really important to the whole experience so I was a little disappointed. There really should have been someone there taking coffee and tea orders and making sure everything ran smoothly.

A couple of years ago I stayed in a hotel in London called the Georgian House Hotel which was cheap but not really that cheerful. However it had a wonderful breakfast that almost made up for the rooms being too hot and uncomfortable. They had lots of exchange student types working in the breakfast room, but the full English and hot coffee and tea was a winner. My mom runs a B&B and she says a good breakfast makes up for a lot of faults. I agree!

So we walked around Haarlem a bit hungover after all those mojitos and happened upon the Teyler's Museum. We have museum cards so it was free,  and although most of the collection was, well, not personally interesting (I hesitate to say boring), the Michelangelo drawings were fabulous. Then we sat in this cute cafe, called 't Teylertje and had carrot cake. Later we sat in Bagels and Beans and had bagels and a macchiato.

We shopped at America Today and their till broke and the teenagers working on shopping Sunday had no idea what to do. Later we sat down in another cafe called Brahms and Liszt which I learned is rhyming slang for what we were on Saturday night.

Oh, and the afternoon before the party we had icecream at Gelateria Bartoli. Oh my god. M had chocolate and caramel. I had lemon and a raspberry yoghurt sorbet. To die for. Must go back.

So, we ate and drank our way around Haarlem and very nice it was too.