A wonderful little appartment, full of clever details: a modern bathroom, an old built-in box bed, a roof balcony with a view of a big stork nest on a big tree. Smack in the center of lots of crucial Amsterdam cafes and restaurants, but far enough from the crowds of tourists. But among all of the clever Dutch tricks, the one with the streets can make you scratch your head. They use bricks not only to build houses, but also to build streets. So when they need to change, say, the entire sewage system, or to install the new cables in an entire city, they just pull out the bricks, lay down the new system in the sand underneath, and then lay down the bricks again. A street rebuilding operation that would take a year in UK, or that took almost 3 years in my neighborhood in the US, gets done in a month or 2 in the Netherlands. So I arrive to my airbnb rental, and the house is wonderful, but there is no street: it's just a pile of sand at the moment. You walk over steel plates go get in. Hmm. They do such things so quickly that they notify the neighborhood just a bit in advance. Hmm. But that is where you get to see a top host in action. The slight hassle of walking on the steel plates to get in was worthwhile in exchange for witnessing Ellen's problem solving skill and motivation in action. I didn't even meet her in person, but her response time to text messages is 15 min top. Ellen, there is no water. A tank of water shows up at the door in 15 min. She negotiates with the workers on the street, and the water is back after an hour. I don't suppose that the other guests are very likely to see her house without the street in front of it, or with the water or gas interruptions. But I thought I would state it for the record that it is sometimes good to have the problems, in order to be able to be impressed with the solutions. It is sometimes nice to travel not just to see the nice places like Amsterdam, but also to see what the world could be like if people cared to make things work.