Haarlem

Wow... the wind is really strong now.

A tree just fell on the road, blocking it for traffic. A public transport bus is parked against it, it looks a bit damaged in front but luckily enough the tree didn't fall on top of the bus itself and nobody seems to be hurt.

It happened right in front of the Hofje Van Noblet, very near the policestation. Here's a satellite picture of the Hooimarkt; the arrow is pointing to the tree that fell.

Ten minutes after it fell the police and firebrigade arrived, five minutes after that photographer came. He parked in front of our house and he didn't pay for his parking. Normally that is a very bad idea in our street, as there is very often police checking. Let's see how it will work out for him in this weather.

There seems to be a fire near the train-bridge. Perhaps the cacao-factory? Again, no camera.

Too bad I don't have Ettie's camera here anymore. There are 3 guys on top of the prison that we see from our window. They're part of the cleaning operation that started a few weeks ago and will take about a year (!).

But at the other hand, who knows?! We're waiting for the helicopter to show up to help them escape...

Today is a car-free day in Europe, and Haarlem is also participating.

A little further down the Spaarne both the sides of the river are blocked for traffic and there's another big street that will be used for a market and children-games instead of for cars.

There are 39 cities in the Netherlands with a car-free Sunday, in Bulgaria 82 (see their website).



The car-free day is an invention of the French minister Dominique Voynet; it started in France in 1998.

This weekend there is a flower carpet at the Grote Markt in Haarlem. Because my toe is in a huge bandage and still hurts, I didn't see it but there's a webcam on top of the City Hall:

Picture Grote Markt, the webcam is here

Just came back from an evening in the pub with Sasha and Irena... we went to Café Fidèl, a new pub that opened two months ago. It's a Cuban style place (yes -- with the sigars), the Haarlems Dagblad has a nice article in Dutch about the place.

picture: Haarlems Dagblad

We went to the draaiorgel museum in Haarlem -- quite interesting. It's a museum in an old factory (in pretty bad shape) that has 10 organs (draaiorgels), with one playing. Today they had a special 'gues', the Johannes Vermeer from Rotterdam. It's definately a nice thing to visit (they're only open on Sunday's). It's quite small; we were done in 30 minutes.

This weekend our city Haarlem is jazz city, there are many performances on stages outside every evening. Friday evening we saw Moodphase5ive, an South-African band. There's a big tent on the Grote Markt (see picture). Too bad it stops at 18:00 already. But... next week will be the Uitmarkt in Amsterdam! The last time I was there was in 1997, last year Sasha, Rob and me tried to get there but we didn't know where exactly it was.