Pentecost Street Organs and Sunset at Zandvoort aan Zee

During my last weeks in Holland I had to finish up research projects and prepare for my Dutch exam.  I now feel like I can understand a good amount of Dutch, but I still need a lot of work on speaking!  Fortunately there was time to see a few more things in the Netherlands before my time was up.  Pentecost weekend is a special time in this part of the world.  In Church we sang hymns about the descent of the Holy Ghost fifty days after Easter, and the talks were also about the Holy Ghost.  In Haarlem there were historic street organs lining the cobblestone roads playing music, and you could go into Sint-Bavo's to hear free concerts on their mammoth pipe organ.

I rode to Haarlem on my bicycle through these woods.  It was especially beautiful that day because of the mist hanging in the branches of the trees.

Here is one of the street organs with a tarp to protect it from the continual threat of rain in Holland.  Sometimes the figures will move their faces as the music plays.

Street organs play from long reels of "sheet music" perforated with holes.  Somehow the machine can read the punched-out notation device and translate it into sounds.

Another street organ near the main market place square.

My days in Holland started to vanish rapidly, and I suddenly realized that I wasn't going to be able to go to all of the places I had been planning to visit!  I did make it to some of the remaining sites on my list, including the famous Teylers Museum, located on the edge of the Spaarne River in Haarlem.  This is the oldest museum in the Netherlands, its collection of fossils, rocks, paintings, and coins having been amassed during the eighteenth century by a rich merchant.

Here is a painting of the exhibitions in the Oval Room during the eighteenth century.

And here is the way the Oval Room looks now.  Isn't that amazing how well the museum restored it?  You feel as if you have just walked into that painting to look at Mr. Teylers' collection of minerals from Africa.  Even the display cases are pretty much the same.

And one more place that I wanted to visit was Zandvoort aan Zee, a little town on the North Sea.  Zandvoort is beyond the barricade of sand dunes that shields Haarlem and the other coastal cities in northern Holland from waves and heavy winds.  These dunes are probably the tallest "hills" in this part of the country!  And I must say that after months of riding my bicycle on completely flat stretches of land, the dunes were kind of a work out!

There was a long band of sand between the end of the dunes and the sea.  You had to watch your step when you got close to the water to make sure you didn't step on beached jellyfish!  The father of the family I was living with went with me, and he told me that every year there is at least one whale that gets stuck on the Dutch coast and dies.

There was supposed to be some kind of eclipse that day that would make the moon turn pink, but there were too many clouds in the sky, and we couldn't see anything.  We did get to see a beautiful sunset over the water, though.

The wet sand reflected the colors in the sky--really beautiful.