Belgium built a beer pipeline. Beer now moves under Bruges. Brewery De Halve Maan sends it from the historic city-centre brewery to a bottling plant through an underground pipe more than three kilometres long. The problem was traffic. Beer is still brewed in the old centre, but moving it by tanker meant heavy vehicles entering narrow historic streets. Bruges wanted the brewery to stay where it had been for generations without making every delivery somebody else’s traffic jam, so the answer was to drill under the city. The pipeline opened in 2016. It runs 3,276 metres beneath public ground, passing under canals, a car park and the old city walls, and reaches about 34 metres below ground at its deepest point. Crowdfunding helped pay for part of it, which may be the easiest Belgian investment pitch ever written: help us put beer under the pavement. A Dutch council might propose timed delivery windows, a logistics hub and a two-year pilot involving electric vans. Bruges put the product in a pipe and removed truck trips from the centre. People now walk the old streets while Brugse Zot and Straffe Hendrik move beneath them toward the bottling plant.

The Dutch made a bin beg. In 1959, Efteling introduced Holle Bolle Gijs, a paper-eating rubbish bin based on the hungry figure from a Dutch children’s rhyme who could never get full. Walk past and he calls, “Papier hier.” Feed him paper and he thanks you. This is behavioural policy designed by people who understood children far better than a sign saying PLEASE KEEP THE PARK CLEAN. The first Gijs was designed by Anton Pieck after Efteling’s visitor numbers and rubbish problem had grown. Instead of hiding another bin beside a bench, the park gave the bin a face, a voice and an appetite. Children began looking for paper because throwing something away had become an attraction. That is Holland in miniature. Give us a public problem and there is a fair chance somebody will solve it with engineering, mild social pressure or a man shouting instructions from a wall. Gijs managed all three without a council leaflet. The cast grew. Efteling now has several versions asking visitors for paper across the park, and the park says the characters still help keep the grounds clean. You can watch a child spot a scrap on the path, pick it up and run toward a rubbish bin because the rubbish bin asked first. Gijs waits with his mouth open for the next piece.

Chile put lifts on a mountain city. Valparaíso rises from its port into steep hills, so from the 1880s the city began building ascensores to connect the lower streets with neighbourhoods above. They are closer to funiculars than office lifts, climbing tracks that can look absurd from below. The city once had 31. More than 15 historic ascensores remain part of the landscape, and several still carry people up and down the hills. A Dutch planner would see the slope and ask where the cycle lane goes. Valparaíso answered with a wooden carriage climbing toward the houses. Some routes are short enough that walking the stairs looks sensible until you see the angle. The Cordillera route runs beside a staircase on a slope that reaches about 70 degrees. At that point the little carriage stops looking quaint and starts looking like a very good use of money. The lifts grew with a port city that had little flat land left for housing. They became part transport, part neighbourhood infrastructure and part identity, with stations opening onto viewpoints, murals and streets high above the harbour. Visitors take photos. Residents still have somewhere to be. A carriage reaches the upper station, the doors open and people step out onto a hill that would have made the stairs a much longer conversation.

Finland treats sweating like heritage. Jeroen Bakker was invited into a lakeside sauna and asked one question before entering: “How hot?” His Finnish host shrugged and said, “You’ll see.” Jeroen, who dislikes unnecessary discussion, accepted this as a complete answer. Inside, he sat on the wooden bench while water hit the heated stones and löyly rolled through the room. After the second splash he looked at the thermometer, decided the number was not useful information and stopped checking it. The host explained that sauna is part of ordinary Finnish life, not a spa event reserved for birthdays or hotels. UNESCO added Finnish sauna culture to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2020. Its nomination noted about 3.3 million saunas in a country of 5.5 million people. They can be electric, wood-heated or smoke saunas, in homes, cottages and public places. Jeroen listened, wiped his forehead and asked whether all 3.3 million had someone in them who kept adding water. The host laughed and opened the door for a break. Outside, the lake was waiting. Jeroen stood on the steps for a few seconds before going in, came back out much faster than he had entered, and returned to the sauna without offering a review. His beer stayed on the bench until his hands stopped being cold.

Mumbai refuses to pack a sad lunch. Every workday, Mumbai’s dabbawalas collect home-cooked meals, move them across the city and deliver the lunchboxes to offices. Their organisation says around 5,000 dabbawalas serve close to 200,000 people. A Dutch office worker can put two cheese sandwiches in a plastic bag at 07:30 and consider lunch solved. Mumbai looked at that level of surrender and built a logistics network instead. The system dates to 1890. Lunchboxes are collected from homes, sorted with a coding system, moved by bicycle, handcart and local train, then sorted again near their destination. After lunch, the empty boxes make the journey back. The clever part is not one miracle machine. It is thousands of repeated handovers, station changes and local routes that workers know well. The codes help each box find the right office without needing an address label that reads like a parcel from an online shop. I also enjoy the priorities. Mumbai has traffic, packed trains and distances that can ruin a schedule, yet someone’s dal still has an appointment. By late morning, stacks of metal tiffin boxes move through stations in the hands of men who have done the route often enough to know where each pile goes next.

France had apps before the web. In 1982, France launched Minitel: a small terminal with a screen and keyboard that connected through the telephone network. People could search the phone directory, buy things, book tickets, read information, send messages and use chat services years before the World Wide Web entered homes. The famous 3615 services arrived in 1984, and by the start of the 1990s about 6.5 million French households had a terminal. That is where the Dutch part of me becomes annoyed. We enjoy presenting ourselves as practical merchants who adopt useful technology fast, yet France had millions of people tapping through online services while half of Europe was still shouting “hang up, I need the phone.” Minitel was not the internet. It ran on its own videotex system, looked crude by modern standards and could make waiting for text feel like a hobby. But the behaviour is familiar: directories, shopping, banking, reservations, messaging and adult chat all found a home there. France kept the system going long after the web had taken over. Orange says two million people still used it in 2010, two years before the service ended. Somewhere in a French attic there is still a beige terminal that once felt like the future, sitting beside a telephone with a cord.

Montréal hid winter under the city. Beneath downtown sits RÉSO, a pedestrian network of about 32 kilometres linking metro stations, offices, hotels, shops, universities, museums and other parts of the centre. Around half a million people use it on a normal day. Canada looked at a winter that can freeze your face and decided walking outside should become optional for part of the journey. I understand the instinct. In the Netherlands, eight minutes of rain is enough for people to cycle one-handed while holding an umbrella and blaming the municipality. Montréal built passages under the city and connected enough buildings that you can go to work, shop, eat and catch the metro without seeing much weather at all. The first links took shape in 1962 around Place Ville Marie and Central Station, and the network expanded as the metro and downtown grew. It is called the Underground City, but it is less one giant basement than a web of connected corridors and commercial spaces. There are signs, maps and entrances all over downtown, yet visitors still manage to emerge somewhere they did not expect. That may be the most city-like part of the whole system. People step in from a snow-covered street, lose a coat layer, buy lunch and come back above ground several blocks away.

Germany took model trains too far. Opa Cor entered Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg with the expression of a man who had agreed to look at toys for an hour. Then he reached the model harbour. He stopped. The retired dock worker leaned over the railing, followed a miniature ship with one finger and began checking whether the cranes were in sensible places. When somebody told him the whole attraction had 16,491 metres of track and 1,231 trains, he asked who maintained the points. That was the moment the visit changed. The place covers 1,694 square metres of model layout and contains more than 292,000 figures. There is even Knuffingen Airport, where model aircraft take off and land through a system that took years to build. Cor watched one plane leave, waited for the next and muttered that the ground crew were faster than Schiphol. We lost him again near Hamburg. He had found the miniature port and was explaining to a stranger why one tiny vessel should have approached the quay from the other side. The stranger nodded with the caution of a man who had not expected a harbour lecture from an 82-year-old Dutchman. At the exit, Oma Ria asked whether he had enjoyed the model trains. Cor said, “The harbour was good,” and checked the map to see whether they had missed any ships.

Australia thinks one trailer is cowardice. In the outback, a truck can arrive with two, three or more trailers behind it, hauling freight across distances that make the Netherlands look like a car park. Under current national heavy-vehicle rules, a road train can reach 53.5 metres in length on approved routes. My Dutch brain sees 53.5 metres and starts asking about roundabouts. Australia has roads where the bigger concern is whether there is another town before the fuel gauge becomes interesting. Road trains exist because remote communities, cattle stations and mines need huge amounts of freight moved across enormous distances. The routes are regulated, and access depends on the road, the vehicle combination and the state or territory. You do not take one through a suburban shopping street because the bakery had a delivery slot. What I enjoy is how normal they look once you have watched a few. The prime mover is still a truck. Then comes a trailer, another trailer and enough vehicle behind it to make overtaking a decision you discuss with yourself first. A Dutch lorry can block the view of one roundabout. An Australian road train can make you forget the roundabout was ever there. On long approved routes, the trailers just keep following the cab into the heat.

Vienna drinks the Alps. Most of Vienna’s tap water comes from mountain springs in the Lower Austrian and Styrian Alps. The water travels toward the city through spring-water mains using the natural drop in elevation, so much of the journey needs no pumps. This is irritating for a Dutchman. We built half our national personality around water management, and Vienna gets excellent tap water because the mountains are higher than the kitchen. The city even uses part of the gravitational energy along the pipelines to generate electricity. Vienna Water operates 31 reservoirs with a combined capacity of about 1.6 million cubic metres, enough for about four days of consumption. One spring shows the scale. The Kläffer Spring can send up to 217 million litres a day toward Vienna. Its water covers an altitude drop of 360 metres and takes about 36 hours to reach the city. That does not mean Vienna has no pumps or backup sources. Some higher pressure zones need pumping, and groundwater can support the system during repairs, damage or periods of heavy demand. Still, the basic route feels almost unfair. Snow and rain fall in the Alps, springs collect the water, gravity takes over and Vienna opens the tap.

Canada has a polar bear jail. Churchill, Manitoba sits on a polar bear migration route, so the town runs a Polar Bear Alert program. When a bear enters the control zone, officers first try to push it away with scaring devices. Bears that cannot be moved, or that present an immediate threat, can be trapped or darted and taken to the Polar Bear Holding Facility. In Dutch seaside towns we complain when gulls steal chips. Churchill has a bear hotline. The holding facility is built for problem bears during bear season. Manitoba says it has five air-conditioned cells for summer use and a heated holding cell for orphaned cubs. The point is public safety without treating every bear near town as an animal that has to be killed. The “jail” nickname makes the place sound comic, but the work is serious. Officers also manage attractants, teach residents what to do, haze bears away from people and use other deterrence before capture becomes necessary. I still cannot get past the Canadian calm of it. Somewhere in Churchill, a resident can call 675-BEAR because an actual polar bear has entered the wrong part of town. That is a number you save in your phone before you need it.

Germany worships pale asparagus. Tante Nelly had passed three roadside Spargel signs before she pulled into a farm shop near Schwetzingen. She picked up a bundle of white asparagus, stared at the price and asked the woman behind the counter why the vegetable looked as if it had never been outdoors. Because it had not, more or less. White asparagus is kept covered with soil so sunlight does not turn it green. Germany waits for the season each spring, sells it from farms and markets, builds restaurant menus around it and stops the traditional harvest on 24 June so the plants can recover. Nelly listened to the explanation and looked back at the shelves. “So you bury it, dig it up, peel it and then celebrate it?” The woman laughed and showed her the different grades. Nelly asked which one she would buy for herself. That answer mattered more than the display card. At lunch nearby, Nelly ordered a plate with white asparagus, potatoes and sauce, cut off one piece and chewed in silence. The waiter came past and asked whether everything was good. “It is a lot of administration for a vegetable,” she said, then pointed at the empty side of the plate and asked for more sauce. Before leaving town she went back to the farm shop. This time she bought two bundles.

Taiwan turned receipts into lottery tickets. The idea began in 1951 as a tax measure. Taiwan wanted customers to ask businesses for proper invoices, because a sale with a receipt was much harder to hide from the tax authorities. So the government added a reason to keep the paper: winning numbers. Dutch people save receipts because a toaster may die eleven months after purchase. Taiwan gave the receipt a second career. Uniform invoice numbers are drawn on the 25th day of every odd month for the previous two-month period. The special prize is NT$10 million, with several smaller prize levels beneath it. Electronic invoices can enter extra prize draws as well. The system turned a boring piece of tax administration into something customers had a reason to demand. That was the point from the start. The Finance Ministry says the hope of winning encouraged people to request invoices, which helped reduce tax evasion and raise revenue. I admire the honesty of the incentive. No campaign telling you that receipts build a stronger society. No poster of a smiling shopkeeper. Keep this number because it might be worth money. A coffee receipt can sit in your pocket for weeks and still have one job left.

Iceland heats the pavement. Geothermal energy already heats about 90 percent of homes in Iceland, but the hot water does not stop at the front door. In many places, pipes run under streets and pavements to melt snow and ice. The Dutch approach to winter is less elegant. We spread salt, complain that the cycle path was forgotten and watch one neighbour attack the pavement with a broom before sunrise. Iceland has hot ground. What makes it better is that this is not some luxury trick outside one hotel. Reykjavik Energy describes snow-melting systems as one of the everyday uses of geothermal heat, alongside warm homes, hot showers, swimming pools and greenhouses. The system does not mean every road becomes dry the second snow falls. Reykjavik still ploughs, salts and prioritises roads and paths during bad weather. Geothermal heat is another tool, used where pipes have been installed. There is something hard to dislike about a country sitting on volcanic heat and deciding that part of it should go under the pavement. If the earth insists on being hot underneath you, using some of that heat to remove ice seems like a fair arrangement.

New York vacuums rubbish underground. On Roosevelt Island, much of the residential waste never waits in bags along the kerb. Buildings connect to an underground AVAC network that uses vacuum pressure to move rubbish through pipes to a central collection station. The system has been part of the island since its first residential phase in 1975. RIOC says the underground network removes the need for most kerbside garbage pickup, while the operator describes close to three miles of buried pipe across the residential area. This is where Dutch rubbish policy feels less ambitious than usual. We bury a container in the pavement, issue a plastic card and then discover the card reader is broken while holding two leaking bags. Roosevelt Island lets the building swallow the bag and sends it away through a pipe. At the terminal, waste is compacted into containers and taken off the island. The system cuts truck movements through a community that was planned with pedestrians in mind. Of course, a pipe full of rubbish can still clog. RIOC has had to repair and upgrade the ageing network, and shutdowns can bring normal collection trucks back into view. That may be the best advert for hidden infrastructure. Residents notice the system most when the bags stop disappearing.

Vienna hangs a branch over wine. Bert Koster stopped under a pine bush hanging above a tavern door in Grinzing and asked the man beside him whether Vienna had forgotten to take down Christmas. The answer was better: the branch and the word “Ausg’steckt” meant the Heuriger was open. That was enough invitation for Bert. A genuine Viennese Heuriger serves wine from its own vineyards, and Bert wanted to know this before he had even found a chair. “Your grapes?” he asked the woman pouring the first glass. She pointed toward the hills. Bert turned in his seat to look, nodded, and took the glass with much more trust than he gives supermarket wine. He joined a long table where two men were halfway through dinner. Five minutes later he knew which district they lived in, which wine one of them preferred and where his brother bought sausages. Bert has never treated an empty chair as private property when there is a conversation nearby. The food came from the buffet, the wine kept coming from the vineyard, and the whole place felt less like a restaurant than a garden where strangers had agreed not to remain strangers for long. When Bert left, he shook three hands at the gate. He had arrived knowing nobody and walked back toward the tram with a paper note containing the name of another Heuriger he had been told to try.

Seoul charges you for leftovers. Throw food scraps into one of Seoul’s RFID bins and the machine can weigh what you brought. A card identifies the household, the bin records the weight and the fee follows the amount you throw away. That would change Dutch dinner behaviour fast. We can spend ten minutes scraping yoghurt from a tub because plastic belongs in one stream and food belongs in another. Add a price per gram and somebody’s father will start weighing potato peelings before dinner. Seoul has pushed this much further. The city moved from pay-as-you-throw food waste toward RFID-tagged bins, and it says the collected food waste is turned into animal feed, compost or biogas. In 2026, Seoul also added a points scheme for households using RFID machines. Cut food waste against the same period a year before and you can earn Eco Mileage points. There is a practical detail that makes the system feel very Korean and very Dutch at the same time: drain the liquid first. Less water means less smell, less weight and less money in the bin. Bones, shells and other hard scraps do not count as food waste in the same way, so residents still have to think before throwing something away. The machine does not care that dinner was a disaster. It weighs what came back.