Our host, Lee, was very nice to arrange for us to visit a hospital pharmacy at Haarlem. So early in the morning,we drove from our house, to Ien’s house (Lee’s youngest sister), a village near to Utrecht city, before we made our way to Kennemer Gasthuis (hospital at Haarlem, north Holland).
Along the way, we saw modern windmills. 
Modern windmills are practically everywhere in The Netherlands. They are used to harvest wind energy to generate electricity!
We finally arrived at Kennemer Gasthuis, which is one of the teaching hospitals in The Netherlands. The pharmacy is located in a separate building from the main hospital and it has a few stories for the picking of medications, small scale manufacturing, quality control and etc. One of Lee’s previous employee, Monique, who just graduated from Pharmacy and is now doing her training of 4 years to specialize as a hospital pharmacist, brought us around. To become a community pharmacist, they will need to do 2 years of training instead, on top of their 6 years of school.
Monique brought us round the pharmacy. It was pretty big, with all the rows of medications in the cupboard. Their medications are placed all over the place, and not classified according to class of drugs or alphabetical order so as to minimize chances of picking the wrong medications that may look/sound alike.
Unlike the hospitals in Singapore, where the freezers are just a few rectangular boxes, here, the freezer is one entire room. And in the picture, you see the door to the ‘ice’ room.
And then we went to another floor to see the manufacturing sector.
Here , along the corridor are the plastic gowns that the staff have to put on when they go into the rooms to make preparations.
The material for this gown are special such that there will be no accidents of fibre falling into the preparations.
This is the room where sterilized injection ampoules are screened manually by 2 staff for the presence of small particles. After they pass the quality check, they would go through this machine to be labeled and packaged into boxes.
We then went into this maze where we can see from windows what each room was doing. This allowed for supervision from the outside of the process without having to put on special gowns and bringing in contamination from the outside to the clean areas.
Prior to going to the room for checking, the ampoules are filled in this clean room with staff fully gowned. This man has to stay in a covered area so as to minimize flow of bacteria from the environment.
A machine that fills the ampoules and the seal them up with flame automatically.
This guy here is doing a report on the culture of the air from the work area. They do this periodically to ensure that the workplace is free from contamination.
These 2 guys are making sterile preparations for cancer treatment. They always work in pair, so that the one seated down will stay there for the whole day, instead of going somewhere to get stuff, and then having to swap his hands with alcohol again before he can go back to the laminar flow chamber to do his work. Basically, the standing guy does all the brain job and pick all the necessary stuff, while the seated guy will just follow instructions from the standing guy or from a protocol what he should do next.
Then Monique brought us to this area where we had to put on ‘astronaut suit’ from head to toe so that we could enter the clean area where they made capsules, cream etc.
Beyond the bench, everything is suppose to be clean, before we step foot through the door where air flow is in one-way direction out to minimize contamination again.
All of us looking silly but fun!
Photography wasn’t allowed in the clean section and hence no pictures for those. But the trip had really been insightful to see how the hospital pharmacy worked in The Netherlands. And it was also great being able to see whatever we learnt in school being applied here. We may all speak a different language, but the practice of pharmacy is universal and that’s what brings us all together.
Monique treated us all to lunch at the staff canteen, before we went to see their outpatient pharmacy where patients that visit the specialist clinics will pick up their medications . Compared to Singapore, it was less busy. No hectic wars to fight. This could possibly be because they have several stepdown hospital/pharmacies else where and hence the patient load is distributed.
We took a final photo outside the outpatient pharmacy before we bade her goodbye.
Ien, Xf me and Monique
We then drove to the city of Haarlem to shop around. Parked the car beside a canal. Canals are everywhere in this country !
The first thing that I saw there was this shop Pas de deux with 50% discount! Being a dance freak, I wanted to visit the shop but the signboard was in the middle of a small lane and I had no idea where the shop was exactly.Plus, didn’t really want to take up everyone’s time and so gave it a miss.
Lee brought us to this serene place collectively known as hofjes. In Lonely Planet, this kind of places are known as Haarlem’s Urban Oases.
Some information for those who don’t know what we’re talking about. From Lonely Planet:
Haarlem is a peaceful city at the rowdiest of times, but even such a serene place needs its fair share of oases. Collectively known as hofjes – leafy tourtyards enclosed by rows of sweet little homes – these green spaces initially served as monastery gardens in the Middle Ages. Eventually they took on broader roles for hospitals and inns, or as refuges for orphans, widows and the eldery. These private squares also give clues about Dutch social concerns and the origins of the modern welfare state.
Most hofjes date from the 15th to the 18the centuries and are open to viewing on weekends only, but you can usually take a discreet peek any time.
Some of the hofjes in Harrlem:
Brouwers Hofje : Lodging for the brewers’ guild in 1472.
Frans Loenen Hofje: Almshouses built from a merchant’s estate (1607)
Hofje van Loo: A women’s hospital donated by mayor Sijmon Pieterszoon van Loo (1489); one of the most visible in Haarlem.
Hofje van Staats: One of the town’s biggest, donated by a Haarlem merchant to poor women of the Reformed Church (1733) and still houses single, elderly women.
St Joris Doelen: A provenierhuis given as a donation; almshouse, later a gentlemen’s inn (1591)
Teylers Hofje: Unusually grand affair, built by Pieter Teyler van der Hulst, founder of the Teyler Museum (1787).
The one that we went to was Hofj van Bakenes. It is the oldest small estate of Haarlem.It was founded intially in 1395.
View of the world outside from inside the hofj.
A water pump in the middle of the garden which they used in the past. Now, it has been locked and no water can be drawn from there.
Flowers in the hofj. pretty flowers everywhere here in the Netherlands.
walked along the streets and we saw this. Any guess for where this is?
yea… the red light district. Saw women dressed scantily in the windows. They have to rent a window and they’d stand there to attract potential customers. No pictures were taken because we read in lonely guidebook that we should refrain from taking pictures if we did not want to be thrown into the canals. 
The McDonald’s of Haarlem.
In the centre of the city’s Grote Markt stands the 17th century Vleeshal, a former meat market and the Verweyhal, an old fish market. They both now serve as modern art annexes of the Frans Hals Museum. This picture shows the Vleeshal. Animals are weighed there to fetch a good price for the farmers.
A random shop window display. Nice masks
Next, we went to Grote Kerk van St Bavo. This is a Gothic cathedral with a towering 50m high steeple. It contained some fine Renaissance artworks, but the star attraction is its stunning Muller organ – one of the most magnificient in the world, standing 30m high with about 5000 pipes. It was played by Handel and Mozart, the latter when he was just 10!
Exterior of the church.
Entering the church, we see the interior of the church. Notice the floor of the church is lined with slabs of stones? And on them are inscriptions.
They are actually the inscriptions like on a tombstone. And beneath those stones lie layers of bodies of the rich and royal family from the past. The church has a whole list of details of who was buried where, when, and where they used to live for identification purposes. Its amazing that such details from centuries ago are kept till now!
A closer look at what’s on the stones.
Replica of ships were hung near the entrance of the church 
The caretaker of the church was very nice and gave us pretty much ‘personal attention’. He showed us this particular part of the church where beneath the wooden plank lay rows of human skulls that belonged to the royalty in the past. They were discovered by the archaelogists and they remain where they were found.
A look now at the church and its magnificient pipe organs.
The back of the church, opposite the magnificient church organ.
Looking in, this is what we saw. Where the lamp is lies the grave of Handel? Not too sure.
The ceiling of the church.
One of the postcards sold at the church had this particular picture too!
We were told that this being a Protestant church, does not have too many pretty stained glass windows as would be seen in a Catholic church. Most of the windows look like this.
However, there were some stained glass windows donated to the church.
We had the fortune to hear the church organ in action as the player was practising on it. Melodious music filled the serene church.
The Organ at St. Bavo constructed 1735-8 by Christian Muller from Amsterdam.The organ features 25 larger-than-life woodwork figures carved by Jan van Logteren.
We saw 2 chinese looking people when in the church, and apparently they were Singaporeans coz we saw their comments in the guestbook. Hence we left ours in chinese too! directly after theirs.
Left the church and we continued to walk around the city, coming into this souvenir shop. There was a huge wooden clog outside the shop. We thought this was big, but we saw HUMONGOUS ones in our subsequent stay in The Netherlands.
Ien and Lee were very nice to get us each a calender that had pictures of Amsterdam so that we would remember The Netherlands everyday of our life next year. Pretty touched by them
The guy at the souvenir shop told Ien about this attraction called “The Hiding Place”. We had plans to visit there when we were doing reading up in Maastricht about Netherlands. But there was no time and hence we had to give it a miss.
For those who are intersted, The Hiding Place was made famous by the motion picture in 1976 called The Hiding Place. It is a quaint little watchmaker’s shop established in 1837 at 19 Barteljorisstraat in the heart of haarlem. It was here in the shop and home of a Christian, Opa ten Boom, and his family that jewish refugees fleeing the wrath of Nazi Germany were hidden for a time during WW2. A hiding place was built in a bedroom where the refugees could go in case the Germans made a surprise inspecdtion. The ten Boom family operated the refuge for more than 18 months, until they were betrayed on february 28,1944.
We then took the car to Zaanstad. This is us eating the almond biscuit. Lee bought it so that we’d have a taste of how the real Sara actually taste like. It has a tinge of almond in it. Kinda like a soft chewy cookie.
Took us quite a while to reach the place because of the jam, and we kinda got lost coz the original road was closed. Hence, we had to take a temporary ferry shuttle over to where we were to go.
And off our ferry went!
It was drizzling slightly. A really pathetic summer to be here in The Netherlands as what the locals said. Coz its been raining almost everyday and the summer is cold and wet!
When we arrived at the other side of the shore, what greeted us was some factory that made nuts. It was like an industrial area and if Ien and Lee were not around with us, we’d probably have thought that we were in the wrong place. We saw a bunch of tourists walking in the opposite direction and that at least let us know that we were on the right track to where we wanted to go.
Finally we arrived at Zaanstad, which is a municipality of Zaandam. The first sawmills were built here in the 16th century and promoted the development of the
The Zaanse Schans offers a variety of fascinating museums. The Zaans Museum houses a magnificent collection of regional artefacts and presents an innovative variety of exhibitions. The museum offers a complete historical picture of life in the Zaanstreek combined with stunning views over the Zaanse landscape.Small, specialised museums situated in heritage buildings in other parts of the Zaanse Schans help to bring history to life the impressive history of the world’s first area of industry.
The Noorderhuis Costume Museum
Museumshop Albert Heijn Grocery
Bakery Museum ‘In de Gekroonde Duyvekater’
The Dutch Clock MuseumMore information can be found here.Unfortunately because of the jam and the early closing hours of shops here, we didn’t manage to visit much, except to sight see and take pictures.
Those green houses are typical Dutch houses.
Us with the windmills (molens in dutch). Over here there are many old windmills and no doubt this is the countryside.
Xf with a windmill.The Netherlands is so closely associated with windmills, that it’s often the first fact people recall about the country. The Dutch built windmills for many centuries (and to some extent, the windmills built the country itself, since without them much of the land drainage could not have occured). In that time the mills were developed for corn milling, land drainage, saw milling, and in fact all manner of industrial purposes. Despite this widespread use, Dutch mills are in may ways quite primitive – using canvas sails, and turned to wind by hand (as distinct from the automated mechanisms that were developed for English windmills, including the fantail, and shuttered sails).
There are a very pleasing number of remaining windmills in the Netherlands – the number is about 1150 and rising, in that the Dutch only count complete workable mills, and in the past 10 years especially many extensive rebuilds have occured to add to this number.
Found this website online which actually allows you to locate a particular windmill and know its original function. Click here
A panorama shot of the place that definitely didn’t justify how pretty the place was.
Walked around, and we saw the first Albert heijn store here in Zaanstad. It was in one of those typical dutch houses. We also saw this shop that sold wooden toys, in particular, pinochio!
Wooden tulips at the entrance of the shops. So colourful! don’t they brighten up your days? It would have been nice to visit fresh tulips in the keukenkof, but sadly tulips weren’t in the season. They bloom from april to may and hence we can only settle for the wooden ones.
Went into the souvenir shop and we see delft wares. They are porceleins with blue prints, which were inspired by china wares.
A deflt violin. Exquisite and pretty isn’t it!
When we left the souvenir shop, it was raining again! 
Braved through the rain and took the ferry back to the other side of the river and went home for dinner with Ien’s husband and children in the house.
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