Once a year, one particular weekend in June, houses located on beautiful canals of Amsterdam are opening their doors to public so people can admire private gardens usually hidden from a view. Even though most of them are museums now, the gardens are still not usually available to visitors - so this is a very special occasion and a chance to see something different, something more personal.
"But how do people feel about opening their doors to so much intrusion?" I asked a friend. "Most of them don't mind" he said "in fact, some of the people quite welcome the visitors and the attention. You must understand that people live very lonely lives and having curious visitors checking out their gardens is actually a welcome entertainment." We both agreed that in private houses we will behave and will not swipe the dust with finger in front of our hosts. There were some house rules (no backpacks, no bags, no pets, etc) but nothing that I would find unusual and in front of each house there were some young students marking our map, each house had a different number on a map and you will get cross or a fish or a heart on each location. We did all of them, this year 25.
What strikes me the most is a tranquility in these gardens - they are in a historical centre of Amsterdam but so well hidden from the streets, mostly as a part of the inner courtyard - that you feel as slipping into another, magic world, far away from the city. While each single of these gardens have their own identity, I have discovered that the little ones, that belong to private families are by far more attractive than the large gardens that are part of museums and therefore somehow generic.
