Guus Bosman

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.

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.