My city secret

My dear friend MyYear has tagged me through her blog to share my Amsterdam "city secrets" with the world. I have been thinking long and hard about this and have found it is not easy for me to come up with something.

When is a secret really a secret? It took me years of living in Amsterdam before I discovered that the nearby Park Frankendael is in fact a lovely place for a Sunday stroll. Most likely this was not a secret to all the other people in the Oost-Watergraafsmeer area but it was to me. I have not yet had a chance to eat there but the glass house based restaurant in the park was high on the list of potential party places for my thesis defense. Too bad that it would have shattered the glass ceiling on my budget. Is it a secret if that cute little Italian restaurant I like is often so full that there is barely a table available? And how could the country's most famous movie theatre qualify as a secret? No, many of my favourite places are no secrets.

The best places in this city for me are the best not by their virtue of being a secret but because of the memories I have there: that first-date café with a name that will certainly trip up anybody non-Dutch or non-sober, the dinner-and-a-movie place where my dad and I sat and talked for hours, the restaurant where a multi-national group of us played multi-lingual scrabble and of which I sadly was unable to commit the name to memory. None of these are secrets in the sense that they are little known must-go-to places. They are just part of the mosaic of my life in Amsterdam, the city I hold so dear. And that is no secret.