Posted on 02/18/2017 4:42:23 PM PST by publius911
On My Way to Somewhere Else Can't remember what , but looking something up on line earlier today I came cross this article :
I have been to Costa Rica many times now, having relatives there who are long time residents. My first trip was around 1999, to the Capital, San Jose, a city of population 335,000, in 2016. Remarkably there was not a single street sign or house or business address in the entire city (that I know of.) As can be imagined, this creates a "Twilight Zone" experience for first time visitors.
The link above defines the situation clearly, but I feel the need to give my first personal experience with the place, as a supplement.
I had spent a few weeks traveling throughout Costa from the volcano just east of San Jose to the Pacific Coast beaches, by accident, on the eve of the infamous Y2K event; The world had freaked out for months in anticipation of some really undefined disaster with computers and dates... when New year's Eve arrived, I found myself on a beach at midnight, in a rainstorm that was comfortably warm, but I digress.
Soon after the family decided should stay an extra week, and I had to change my return flight date on United Airline. So we looked up the telephone number for UA (they do have a phone book, which I am sure must be a riot to use...
So we reached the UA office on the phone, and inquired how we could find it the place, and here was the result:
Heading west on the street where a famous plaza is (it had a name) travel east to the intersction where the U.S. Embassy used to be. Our office is diagonally across that intersection. Of course, having a long time resident along helped, but she had to stop and ask a local where the U.S. Embassy used to be (25 years before!) and we managed to update my itinerary.
Costa Rica is a laugh a minute, a strange mix of First World and Third World experience every day.
Worth the adventure. Just before reaching our destination I noticed looking ahead on t very straight street that all cars did a funny maneuver as in turning around something blocking the intersection; at every intersection... turned out to be sewer manholes at the center of each intersection -- all missing the manhole covers which had been stolen to sell as scrap metal, and not replaced...
Imagine the fun ordering delivery pizza :
A white two story house on the road from San Jose to town X, headed east, 300 meters past the "Comisariato" (a sort of Police station) in Curridabat ( a neighborhood of San Jose) then 200 meters north just before the small bridge... .
On my way to somewhere else. Praise the Lord, it is well with my soul
Costa Rica does have street signs and streets with names and a logical system. Calles (streets) run one direction and Avenidas (avenues) run the other. But the Costa Ricans don’t use the system for the most part. Addresses really work like this: there’s some local landmark that everyone knows (it doesn’t even have to be there anymore) then you are so many meters north, so many meters west, and so many meters south of that place. So it might be like “Pan Am building, 600 m south, 300 m west, 20 m north.” And it works! Cab drivers will drop you off right at the door with this system and that’s how their addresses work for mail as well.
Inefficient and unwieldy, though.
Like going to my cousins place in Marietta, Georgia. Go past the big chicken and make a left.
My cousin had to write out directions to her house for me to give to the cab driver the next day. And forget about mailing packages to her family; you just have to wait until they are visiting her hometown in Alabama and send stuff to them there.
Hilarious! I know a “take a left at the recliner” address in Louisiana, but I like your chicken story even better.
I always try to remember the street past where I want to turn, so I know when I’ve gone too far.
My cousin is also in San Jose, Costa Rica, I should have said. Her dad loves visiting down there because he can drive like a maniac, like the locals, and not get a ticket for a change!
Costa Rica is an interesting place. I visited years ago and was there around 10 days. I flew into San Jose, stayed there the first couple of days, figured I had seen everything of note in the entire country and that I would be bored out of my skull trying to occupy myself for the next 8 days. I then chilled out, took on a Tico attitude, rented a car, and rambled over to Puntarenas on the west coast. I ended up having a very enjoyable stay. Would like to go back some time. If Shillary Clinton had been elected last Nov., I might even have looked at moving down that way.
When I worked in 1980s Kuwait, a buddy gave me directions to his house: "turn right off the Abu Halifa exit and then a left at the big sand dune."
If you go past the Big Chicken before you turn left, you might end up in a pretty bad area.
Yes, it likely is. But it is how humans have identified locations since forever (minus the meters of course). But even Japan works on a similar system. The post office (and likely the police) know where everyone lives using a system that only they use. In Tokyo most streets don’t have names and you can’t really an “address” to take a cab to a particular location. “It’s so many blocks from such and such shrine” and you work your way in from there.
The Costa Rican system, such as it is, may baffle outsiders but the Ticos and Ticas seem to be able to work it pretty well. They do have GPS that they use to get to “the landmark” and then do the north, west, south system from there—they do seem to have a good handle on how far “200 meters” is. What’s really different is their reliance on landmarks that no longer exist. There’s a neighborhood in San Jose called “Coca Cola” from a plant that disappeared decades ago.
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