My gf once asked me why I wouldn't just park on the street, it was night, it was Delft (Netherlands), it was very still standing water in one of the canals with leaves on top.

It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was in Delft.

This reminds me of a story when I was a kid.

We used to have a big pond in the frontyard. One day it was completely covered in duckweed (kroos in dutch) and one of my friends just walked straight into it, not aware of the water underneath.

Glad you didn’t try that out with your car!

that's just very bad design keeping water at same level with street, I was under impression channels in Netherlands are always below ground level for many obvious reasons

It wasn't designed that way. In other locations in the city, street level is at least 150 cm above the water. But because of natural subsidence, ground water extraction, construction and peat oxidation, some parts of city's peat soil have subsided in the last few decades to only 25 cm above the water.

https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-compart...

Sometimes the water decides to do that on its own.

I've ridden through Chiang Mai after a heavy rain when the streets were all a foot deep, so you'd get a nice foot wash riding along and despair for your flip flops when stopped.

And if you strayed too far from the car in front or cut a corner, you'd find the 4 foot deep drainage ditches and 12 foot deep canals along the sides of the main roads.