Memorizing Dutch Municipalities with Anki

As a Dutch expat living in Germany, I have come to appreciate the beauty of the infrastructure and man-made landscapes back in the Netherlands. Sometimes, I miss my Heimat. A guilty pleasure of mine whenever I do is to play GeoGuessr with another Dutch expat friend of mine. This is a game where you get dropped at a random locations in Google Street View, and you have to guess where it is. If your guess is far away from the actual location, you lose points, and when you run out, the other player wins.

I decided I want to get better at this game. There are some very fanatic YouTubers who manage to guess locations wordwide with amazing accuracy and speed. However, I'm going to specialize in the Netherlands. Since every town shows the municipality it is part of on the town sign, I figured a good place to start is to learn all of them. Luckily, there are only 345 in total.

The Gemeente Atlas shows an overview. I wanted to use the great (and free) spaced-repetition program Anki to memorize them. I used the Python API of Playwright, which to my knowledge is the best and most versatile browser automation framework in existence currently, to write a script that extracts all images and creates a deck of Anki flashcards.

Thanks to AnkiDroid I am also able to practice on the go:

If you for any reason want to memorize the Dutch municipalities as well: you can download the Anki deck I made and import it into Anki.