Thursday, 15 September, 2022 – Elias said that they’d bought tickets to go to the Van Gogh Museum today so I assume that is where they spent some of the day. When I looked up where he was this morning, he was about a kilometer away from the museum – and not very far from where he is staying in Oosterpark.
I looked up the Van Gogh Museum website. This is a tangent but I am going to say it anyway: I think the pages on the website are too hard to browse. Maybe because I’ve been reading about accessibility guidelines for the web. Maybe because I am on a laptop, not a desktop. Maybe it is just me. (I don’t think so.) They put images of paintings by other people right next to images of Van Gogh’s paintings, which is confusing. (That may work in person but not on a webpage.) To prevent users from saving out an image of a painting from the website, they made the images too small. And they used archival terminology and organization on a site that is clearly not a repository. (If it were a repository, there would be a larger version of the images available.)
Enough complaining about the website. I know I can be sort of persnickety. 🙂 I expect the museum was great, though.
I feel sort of ashamed to admit this, but I have never been clear about the difference between “Holland” and “The Netherlands.” So I looked it up. Turns out, I am not alone in my confusion. There are so many people confused, the Dutch government decided in 2019 to rebrand as “The Netherlands” and stop encouraging people to use “Holland” as shorthand. North Holland and South Holland are just two of 12 provinces in The Netherlands, and the other 10 provinces were tired of being referred to as Holland by numbskull foreigners, like me. I found an article on The Guardian about the Dutch government’s decision and a graphic that illustrates the issue.
