park bark mark

A number of years ago (about seven at a guess, though without digital pictures and EXIF data it took a few minutes' poking around in old emails to work out that it would have been somewhere between the 20th and the 25th of February 2002) when we visited Amsterdam we popped to the Vincent van Gogh museum and came out slightly more sympathetic to his stuff, especially as the temporary exhibition alongside the permanent collection focussed on van Gogh's relationship with (and seeming helpless adoration of) Paul Gaugin, who came across as a bit of a cocky tube even after filtering out the curators' institutional preference. This was borne in mind today when the musée René Magritte was visited; I wasn't massively keen on him, mostly due to having read stuff he'd said or written in relation to what he'd painted, though some of his stuff was reasonably entertaining. The audioguide (though the numbers were occasionally mixed-up or not indicated the display of the unit showed the picture in question, allowing the correct concealed commentary to be found) prevented a quick walk round just looking at things, though without the guide I'd have probably taken longer as none of the correspondence and publications displayed alongside the paintings were translated. Though there was a degree of artspeak-poncery here and there it was presented in such a way that it appeared to be more the fault of the commentator, critic or curator rather than Magritte himself. Another quirk of the guide was that the bloke doing the English version insisted on pronouncing "Magritte" as "ma-grit" to rhyme with sit, bit, whit and flit rather than the seemingly more applicable "ma-greet" to rhyme with eat, seat, pleat, feet, wheat, greet and suite. Unless that is really how it's supposed to be pronounced, contrary to the way every Belgian Magritte-associate speaking on a recording in the background on the guide pronounced it. Anyway, one emerges from the museum with a slightly better impression of him and a sense of surprise that it's taken over two hours to go round just that part of the museum.

The combi-tickets we'd bought cover both ancient/modern art sections of the Musées des Beaux Arts as well as the new Magritte bit and whilst we were prepared to miss some of the older stuff the more modern bit appealed, though we had to take a break for some cake and a cup of tea to revive a weary Nicky. The café wasn't particularly cheap but the cake-pieces were very nice and reasonably fresh, though getting and eating them took up another half-hour of valuable trying-to-hold-the-way-too-loud-audio-guide-near-but-not-against-the-ear-in-such-a-way-as-to-be-able-to-hear-it-but-not-be-deafened-whilst-also-trying-to-muffle-it-so-as-not-to-irritate-anyone-nearby-not-interested-in-hearing-a-commentary-perhaps-not-applicable-to-the-picture-they-are-looking-at time. I had come prepared with headphones in my pocket but whilst the audioguides were the amongst the most advanced I've seen (with the small picture-capable display to indicate the picture being guided audibly) they didn't have a 3.5mm headphone socket. The purpose of the 2.5mm socket they did have will be forever mysterious, unless I ever come back and bring my 2.5 to 3.5mm adaptor. Not that coming back to that particular museum is particularly likely; despite still attempting to at least look at everything (whilst looking slightly more closely at only at interesting-looking things and listening to the audio description only when the interesting-looking things also had an audioguide number-label) I still had to slightly rush through the last bit of the most modern section in order to then waste ten minutes looking for a toilet (which wasn't near the stairwell where there should have been one) before heading back to near the entrance (where the toilet ended up being). There was still a good twenty minutes of official being-open time left but as I'd had to go back through a turnstile to get back to the entrance (asking a guard-bloke if the only toilets were indeed back through the turnstiles on the way there) I was unable to get back through the turnstile on the way back as scanning my ticket no longer worked and the guard-bloke questioned on the way up had since disappeared. Going back into the main bit of the museum and attempting to get back to the modern bit via another route didn't work as there was another guard-bloke sitting near the stairs who said nothing but watched me very directly as I approached the stairs. Preferring to be able to ask in my own time if there was anything wrong with what I was attempting to do rather than have to attempt to translate at speed if challenged shoutily when I put my feet on the stairs I asked ("if it was still permitted for visitors to ascend or descend the stairwell in order to go and finish seeing the arte moderne from the 20th century which finds itself on the sixth floor below the ground", as I recall) and was told that although there hadn't yet been an announcement asking everyone to bugger off that I was not permitted to go either up or down the stairs as the announcement was to be made in three or four minutes, despite my watch saying that there should still be about fifteen minutes of wandering-about available before there was any need to make any sort of announcement or prevent people going up or down stairwells. There wasn't a great deal of stuff to look at on the ground floor entrance-section and the sheer daft unpleasantness of penalising people for going to the toilet made me spend the remaining minutes until Nicky reappeared thinking of whether it was worth sacrificing a further two euros on the deposit for the cloakroom-locker in order to hide our two audioguides in there (along with a small note criticising the bog-forfeit policy) before hiding the key somewhere and fleeing, though as this was a purely theoretical speculation we settled for hanging around in the shop until well past the official closing-time even though we had no intention of buying anything. Still vaguely considering some form of polite email-routed whine at them even though I never quite got round to actually doing the last thing I was vaguely considering making a written complaint about (which I think was the volume in several Fringe venues).

As we were vaguely in the area we popped for a look at the giant Euro-office. It's very big. They must have immense fun if they ever have an entire-site fire or bomb alarm or drill, though they probably get round it by classifying the different sections as discrete buildings even though they're all joined by walkways.