I kept on bumping into her. We met for the first time at an Instagrammers event and then we stumbled upon each other at the Creative Mornings. She was cheerful, super talkative, and she came across as a real creative entrepreneur because she not only had loads of ideas but also the sort of energy which is necessary to put them into practise. The second time we met she told me, “I took a nice photo of you, last time at the meet-up, you know? I’ll send it over.” The next morning I had the photo you see on the right bar of the blog in my e-mail box. I had a wow-reaction. I was kick-starting Amsterdive at the time, so the picture came in handy. Elise’s kindness stuck to me.

We never made an appointment to meet each other. I was already writing the cultural agendas for Amsterdive so I was attending a good deal of events. It was a very active period for me in which, every now and then, I would just go places alone if all my friends were busy. Funny thing was, most of the times I didn’t get to be alone because Elise was usually there as well. We kept on bumping into each other at concerts, cafes, parties, talks. Our love of samba was the ultimate glue to this friendship.

When, one day, I started thinking about “partners-in-crime” for the Amsterdive’s cultural agendas, the first person who came to my mind was Elise. We had matching interests and that girl was obviously in the know. So I texted her: “Let’s meet up for coffee”. She replied, “Let’s meet at H/eart.h, and I’ll introduce you to these friends of mine”. So we met there, right in the heart of De Pijp. We talked ideas over, and she introduced me to this lovely vegetarian cafe / restaurant / art gallery / concept shop. Arts + veggie food had to be the perfect combination for me. “Want to come to the live Sounday with me?”. And this was Elise’s first contribution to the Amsterdive’s Cultural Agenda. Elise is now, officially, a guest editor at Amsterdive, and you can go and say hello to her here!

You can find Elise’s photography work here as well