33 ms·

Costa Rica’s enigmatic addresses (2021)

159 points by lsllc 4y ago

vishnugupta 4y ago
Not too different from Indian addresses. “Next to a temple xyz…”, or “Near Mother Dairy factory …” and so on. Also its not uncommon to come across two adjacent buildings to have significantly different addresses.
sakopov 4y ago
An example address in Costa Rica. Pretty wild. [1] > Mr. John Smith From St. Mark's Church, 50m to the west and 100m to the north, gray colored house San José, San José, Desamparados 30508 - Costa Rica [1] https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/costa-rica/housing/postal-system https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/costa-rica/housing/postal-s...
- mbauman 4y ago
  Nicaragua is similar, and in Managua it's even more convoluted with things like: > From where the old Franciscan church used to be, 2 blocks towards the lake and 1 block and 50m up Where you have to know a historical landmark, that "towards the lake" is North (even if the lake isn't in sight), and "up" is not up a hill but rather the direction in which the sun comes up.
  - cossatot 4y ago
    20 years ago I used to occasionally ship tens of thousands of dollars of geophysical surveying equipment from Arkansas to the office of INETER (Nicaraguan governmental earth sciences division). The address was something like "INETER, frente del policlinica oriental, Managua, Nicaragua" (across from the Oriental polyclinic). And DHL would come through!
    - sakopov 4y ago
      Heh, last year I was renewing my car registration online and used an option in the system to send the license plate tags to a new address I recently moved to. I ended up fat-fingering the zip code and was really worried that they wouldn't arrive, but to my surprise new registration came to my new address a couple of days later. I can now see how such a small typo is a non-issue to a carrier that's dealing with routing issues like you're describing!
      - cafard 4y ago
        A number of vendors sell address correction software, and I imagine that the DMV can afford such a product.
    - jessekv 4y ago
      In Spanish, 'oriental' is the east compass direction, and 'occidental' is the west compass direction. I would translate it to "the East Polyclinic".
      - PTcartelsLOL 4y ago
        Eastern and oriental are kind-of synonymous in Portuguese and I bet in most Latin languages.
  - aaronharnly 4y ago
    I've read in a book (which I can't recall the name of) that many of the informal landmarks in Managua were destroyed in the earthquake of 1972, yet remain in use as addresses.
- bombcar 4y ago
  There's an old joke in the US that getting directions in a rural area is like this "go down the old road until you get to the place the red barn used to be, then take a right past where the old pasture was, take a left at the first dirt road, can't miss it".
  - eatsyourtacos 4y ago
    I live in a semi-rural area and my wife tells me how to get to places in relations to the animals I'll pass. "Take a left at the cows, then keep going but if you hit the llamas you've gone too far."
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I'm in a similar area and I'm always a bit surprised how well those types of descriptions work - I'm looking at it and going "this is a parse error, there's no way" and then I start driving and I'm like "yeah, the only way to describe this is 'left at the cows'."
    - buildsjets 4y ago
      I have several times given directions to an aerospace testing facility, with instructions to "Turn left at the miniature horse farm, but if you pass Frank's Deer Urine, you've gone too far and missed it." https://www.flickr.com/photos/93733769@N03/11848099843 https://www.flickr.com/photos/93733769@N03/11848099843
      - aaronharnly 4y ago
        Honesty it’s just a sweet pleasure seeing a sign with a phone number without area code.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    In my town, lots of people provide directions via "the Old High School" -- which I later learned is the current middle school. Funny how this stuff develops.
  - 4y ago
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  Had a house in Spain that had a similar address, officially the address was something like "unknown street 1A", so for all deliveries I needed to specify as "the yellow house by this and this road just outside the town". The couriers got almost always lost, so I had to add them to whatsapp and send the location.
ninju 4y ago
If you need to deliver some official documentation to some in Costa Rica it's gotta be tough I wonder how DHL, FedEx and other delivery services handle it.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  They hire local people that know the system and can navigate it. When I was in CR navigating was not simple, but I always got where I wanted to be. In a way it was interesting as very precise time was not possible, I think that makes people a lot more relaxed - probably "relaxed" is the best way to describe my work colleagues in CR.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    > I think that makes people a lot more relaxed - probably "relaxed" is the best way to describe my work colleagues in CR. It's one of many reasons Costa Ricans tend to appear very "relaxed". The national motto is "Pura Vida", which translates to Pure Life. It can be used to say hello, goodbye, yes, no, maybe, anything really :). My wife and I use it whenever things don't happen as planned to us in CR. Like when the electrician says he'll be here 9 AM Monday, that translates to "sometime next week".
    - sethrin 4y ago
      People tell you what you want to hear, because it's rude otherwise. You get all kinds of wrong directions too, because people want to be seen as helpful even if they don't know. When people tell you something will be done on $day, it is sure as sunrise that it absolutely will not be done that day, and probably not that week, and maybe not that month. People make do, and don't stress too much -- pura vida!
- marymkearney 4y ago
  Sending law clients original documents (USCIS approval notices, etc.), was always a nail-biter. Shout-out to DHL, which never missed one. Still we'd keep hitting refresh on the tracking # till it was delivered. Sounds a little easier now.
spenczar5 4y ago
The article asks an interesting question, and then totally fails to answer it. I want to know more!
- rascul 4y ago
  It's briefly answered: > The explanation came from Geovanny Campos of Correos de Costa Rica, the company that manages the country's postal service. As he told Luis Fernando, San José’s growth was characterized by disorder. As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense. > Eventually, nobody used them. Although it doesn't seem like much of an answer.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Many places, especially in South America and adjacent, have expanded WAY FASTER than the (slow) bureaucracy can handle. Houses get built on streets that don't exist in any official planning document, such that the water supply can't even keep up and water has to be brought in by truck or you have to store it in cisterns and have pumps. In the USA we're used to grids being laid out when there are even no streets (see towns like California City: https://www.wired.com/story/california-ghost-metropolis-gallery/ https://www.wired.com/story/california-ghost-metropolis-gall... ) but that is not universal.
    - twelve40 4y ago
      > Houses get built on streets well somebody is doing it... if they bothered to build a whole house, how hard is it to assign a number to it? Sounds like a chaotic nightmare and not nearly as cute nostalgic as the article tries to make it.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        It's not hard to assign a number to a house, but you need to know a name for the street, and the person who can assign the name has to fill out the paperwork, but then the central government will ask what the @#$@# they are doing adding a street without doing X Y and Z, and so on. What's interesting with Costa Rica is they apparently never formalize; in Mexico a similar thing would occur but at some point actual street names would get added. Then again mail delivery in Mexico at the time was quite sporadic, hardly done at all (companies like the electric company would hand-deliver bills from their own couriers).
gorbypark 4y ago
Something like What Three Words could be useful there. If someone came up with an open solution, using Spanish words, maybe it would catch on?
- elil17 4y ago
  Google's plus codes are open source and probably more useful than What Three Words: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ I think they are a better solution because they are hierarchical (removing the right most character of the code gives you a larger region encompassing the longer code) - that means that nearby places will have codes with similar prefixes. They also exclude visually similar characters, making them easy to read and handwrite.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The huge HUGE disadvantage to both is you need something with an internet connection, or at least a database, to find where you're going. Whereas anyone who can understand the language and is in the area can find "the red house behind the hospital".
    - elil17 4y ago
      Unless the hospital doesn't exist anymore, as mentioned in the article. Then you'd need local knowledge.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > removing the right most character of the code gives you a larger region encompassing the longer code When I tried that, Google just told me it didn't recognize the code. Is it a recognized method or just a useful attribute for human interpretation?
    - elil17 4y ago
      I oversimplified this, sorry. You have to pad the plus code so that the segment to the left of the plus has enough characters, and there are a couple other rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
TrainedMonkey 4y ago
> Every address in Costa Rica is in relation to something else, and sometimes to things that no longer exist. > My apartment, for instance, is three houses down from the local high school. The high school’s official address is 300 meters east of the elementary school. The elementary school’s address is across the street from the church — or next to the bar, depending on your piety. > That comes at a cost: A 2010 study found that informal addresses cost Costa Rica $720 million annually due to lost mail and lost productivity. And how many lives could be saved if ambulances (or police, or firefighters) were dispatched to precise locations? > “One reason that changes are so tough to implement is that the old way is dearly beloved,” wrote author Katherine Stanley Obando. “It’s a language, an insider’s code.” My read is because it was always this way, people are resistant to change, and whatever pain is caused by this is tolerable.
- cultureswitch 4y ago
  You haven't read the whole article. The most bewildering thing about this is that they used to have formal addresses in the past.
  - helloayo 4y ago
    They probably had formal addresses but used informal directions. They do this in my grandmother's small town. No one will give you an actual address despite having one.
    - TrainedMonkey 4y ago
      Concur, from reading the article I got that formal system was officially instituted and put in the books, but nobody used it. Trying to verify this by Googling only brought existence of formal addresses to light... which is what author was suggesting. Fascinating aspect of this is dominance of structured, but ultimately useless* information on the internet. * - as claimed by the author, as noted above I was not able to get a clear picture after ~5 minutes of Googling.
cultureswitch 4y ago
I should show this to the cute UX developers who think having anything more structured than a "country" field and an "address" field in a worldwide address form makes any sense.
- stronglikedan 4y ago
  First, show it to the shipping providers who require all the discrete address fields.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  "if the customer selects Costa Rica, they get a 6 row freeform textarea and the submit button label becomes Person Shrugging, U+1F937"
- popcalc 4y ago
  https://www.lob.com/blog/autocomplete-and-verify-address-with-react-components https://www.lob.com/blog/autocomplete-and-verify-address-wit... Very few companies should roll their own if they're not in the logistics business themselves.
pomatic 4y ago
I think No. 1, London might be close? IIRC it's Clarence House/What was or is King Charles' residence.
- tenpies 4y ago
  Not sure about London, but I've always gotten a kick out of Neil Oliver's mail, which manages to arrive despite some of the oddest addresses: Without even a name: https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1628434030919049221 https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1628434030919049221 With name, but only the city as far as usable address information: https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1631313939198877696 https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1631313939198877696 Now granted, he is a TV presenter and Stirling is a small town (sub 100,000 people), but there is some romanticism behind a letter only arriving because some person in the mail sorting facility has some faint idea of who you are.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    If you pay your postal workers well enough that they care about their job, you don't need any formal addressing beyond getting the letter to the right person. A postal code can be enough in some cases! Back in the day, the mailman knew how to find every house in his area. With larger cities you'll probably need more mailpeople, but there's no reason why it this system can't work today. It is working in Costa Rica, at least. Automated systems and digital catalogues are expensive to set up and a pain to maintain. If you live in a remote village of 1000 people, a place name and a last name are often all you need to get your mail delivered. In your example, a Stirling is a town of 38k people. Names may not be enough for everyone, but house names and descriptions will certainly do the job. All the sorting facility needs to do is make sure the mail ends up in Stirling and let the mail handle itself from there!
  - schoen 4y ago
    I met Cleto Pavanetto, who was the head of the Vatican's Latinitas Foundation, around 2008. (Our only common language was Latin!) https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto He told me that he could receive mail addressed only to Cletus Vatican That's the shortest address (?) Of anyone I've met, I think!
nsenifty 4y ago
This is true to a large extent in India. My childhood home address in a very small town was something like "person name, behind government hospital, town". Even in the cities, depending on the city, it is usually a combination of number and cross streets (e.g. #50, 5th Main, 6th cross). If you aren't familiar with the area, there are ten different 5th mains and it is always a bit of a crap shoot finding the right one.
orangepurple 4y ago
This is a solved problem. https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code There are other similar systems out there too.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  My house could be any one of about 130 plus codes. Do I just choose the one that corresponds with my front door? I suppose as a practical matter any of the codes would get someone close enough that a visitor could figure out the rest on their own, but it does introduce some ambiguity about what my address really is.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    You need to use the longer plus code variant and aim it at your front door. If the structure has multiple dwelling units you need an apartment number after the plus code. Problem solved. Plus codes are derived from latitude and longitude coordinates, so they already exist everywhere. They are similar in length to a telephone number – 849VCWC8+R9, for example – but can often be shortened to only four or six digits when combined with a locality (CWC8+R9, Mountain View).
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      I read the question as the opposite -- that the poster's property covers 130 plus codes, so which one do you pick? It does strike me as quite non-obvious what is the proper level of precision. If you own a ranch, are you pointing to the middle of the ranch far away from the house on its corner, or are you pointing to the house itself, but which is also almost next to the house on the neighboring ranch? Places aren't points and they also aren't areas that fit into pre-existing grids. In reality they tend to be quite irregular shapes whose conceptual "landmark" point (front door, lobby, reception area) is often far away from their geometrical "center of gravity".
      - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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paxys 4y ago
The surest sign of a failed system is people in power justifying it as "this is our culture". You could send a letter with a formal address in San Jose 30 years ago and it would get delivered. Today it likely will not. This has nothing to do with culture or nostalgia, but rather a breakdown in urban planning and failing to deal with population growth.
- hadlock 4y ago
  My uncle used to live on an old ranch road in west Texas. It didn't really go anywhere just connected to larger roads together, probably 20 miles long and kind of wound through a couple of minor valleys. Eventually all the road frontage on that road slowly got sliced up in to parcels for mini-ranches of 30-90 acres, the county sort of numbering them as they went along. Eventually the numbering system on that road got so messed up, someone called for an ambulance and died because the ambulance couldn't find the house. A month later the county formally renumbered the whole road and each mailbox has a bright new blue 6x12" "house number" reflective sign. This meant they had to go through the property records and redraw all the plats with the new labels. I don't have any idea how a city or country can do any kind of property taxation without formal addresses. Or a census. Or transfer of Real Property. There must not exist any kind of title insurance because without property and tax records you can't keep track of who owns what. I'm curious if the author consulted the tax office because street names are critical to the relation of ownership of property to physical location. Occasionally property records will reference "iron spike at corner of property" but those aren't definitive and move/get lost. Streets rarely change location or get lost.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    I own property in Costa Rica. From what I understand, property records, taxes & ownership were a huge problem up until ~10 years ago when all the disparate property record systems were merged into a nationalized, computerized, property record system. To pay my property taxes, I just log into my county's website and pay with a Visa card. It's very easy. Our property record uses GPS coordinates and relative distances from those points to determine the boundaries of the property. It's common to have the surveyors with their fancy laser & GPS machines come out during due diligence in a real estate transaction. It feels pretty similar to the rest of the world now, though it hasn't always been this way.
renewiltord 4y ago
Interestingly, Indian addresses have both the formal and the hint method. https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/india/housing/postal-system https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/india/housing/postal-system Same, non-grid city growth, but somehow the formal addresses held here.
ortusdux 4y ago
Several groups have 'solved' this issue by making more human readable coordinate systems. IIRC, What3Words kicked things off, but there were licensing and regional issues that slowed adoption. I personally like Google's free and open source Plus Codes. You can vary the precision by adding more digits to the location: "The precision of a plus code is indicated by the number of digits after the "+" sign. Two digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 13.7 by 13.7 meters; Three digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 2.7 by 3.5 meters; Four digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 0.5 by 0.8 meters." https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/learn/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/learn/
- VLM 4y ago
  MGRS military grid reference system works the same way, more digits more precision. There's a mil-sci-fi novel (forgot name, can't google) where some artillery officer thinks its funny to be a dick and give out ten digit grids "because he can" whereas normal humans mostly use 8 digit grids (like you'd use in a 9-line). I thought that book reference was funny because I'd give out ten digits for the LOLs when I was in the Army. Everyone who gets access to Y or M-code DGPS for the first time has to be a joker LOL. 8 digits is good enough to park a car, 10 digits is good enough to specify an individual theater seat (roughly) GPS is like TV where most people consider it magic and don't care how it works, but if you're of a technical bent there's an infinitely deep rabbit hole to dive into.
  - myself248 4y ago
    Civilian L1+L2+DGPS is like that now. I can specify my left footprint differently from my right footprint and the difference is meaningful.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Plus codes are now nearly a decade old. I always thought they were a cool idea, but has anybody actually started using them as part of everyday life? Not as a novelty extra, but actually a main productivity flow for anything? Seems like usually when people need to send an exact location short-term then send a pin from Google/Apple Maps. While reference works use traditional lat/lon. It did always seem to me that they'd work well as a kind of foundation for postal codes, in places without regular addresses -- exactly what you seem to be suggesting here. But has any country or municipality done so?
fallinghawks 4y ago
Carmel, California does not have street addresses either. It's a small place https://ci.carmel.ca.us/post/addresses https://ci.carmel.ca.us/post/addresses
- r00fus 4y ago
  We visited recently and I was tickled by how many of the homes had their names prominent from the sidewalk. Seemed like a cute meme, but this info makes it clear it's for postal deliveries and guests too.
- popcalc 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ib4butj0b0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ib4butj0b0
hadlock 4y ago
We went to Costa Rica for a week, was planning on getting engaged there. Had heard all the stories of how beautiful it was, etc. Rented a car and drove up the mountain all the tourists go to. In most cases Costa Rica was as expensive if not moreso than the Bay Area. This really spoke to me: > Costa Rica’s streets are in awful shape, traffic is terrible, and the addresses mean no one knows exactly where they’re going — so Ticos always have an excuse to be late. I've been to many, many countries, driven in about half of them; the main road from the capital to the main tourist mountain is in awful shape. Driving at night is super sketchy not because of crime but simply because the roads are (barely) carved into the side of hills, frequently a single lane, and no paint markings of any kind, especially on the side of the road. This makes driving at night on black, wet asphalt a real chore to even stay on the road. The reason I mention price is that for what they charge tourists, the tourism infrastructure (pretty much the road link between the airport and the mountain) is abysmal. We ended up getting engaged elsewhere. Costa Rica is a beautiful country with wonderful people but it's not for me.
- therein 4y ago
  I drove all over Costa Rica for a week, we were trying to go to a zoo or something but ended up in Nicaraguan border after getting lost.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  For the exact opposite road experience visit Iceland.
  - hadlock 4y ago
    I was pleasantly surprised by the roads in Malaysia. We were doing the equivalent of 80MPH on the main N-S road between Kuala Lumpur and Penang and dudes would blow past us in a Toyota Hi-Ace minivan doing 100MPH. Some of the best roads I've ever driven on, even better than the roads in Texas. Heading up into the mountains to see the tea plantations, even the secondary roads were at least two lanes and well marked, but well maintained, even if it was impossible to pass slow-moving trucks.
gumby 4y ago
What a bias as to what is “real” and not real about an address. Are addresses in Utah not “real”? When Australia required that buildings be assigned a street number my grandmother simply ignored the rule: never posted a number on the gate and continued to use her house name, until she passed away more than four decades later. Was her use not “real”?
- alar44 4y ago
  [dead]
- CharlesW 4y ago
  TFA uses "real" to mean "formal" address systems.
- helloayo 4y ago
  agree
simlevesque 4y ago
It's hard to get around at first but the locals will help you greatly in my experience.
duxup 4y ago
How does this work for say looking up map directions in a maps app?
- leesalminen 4y ago
  Normally the place you're going to just sends you a pin in Google Maps/Waze. Or you set the closest landmark and then use the descriptive address to self-navigate from there. Or you call the place as you get close and have them guide you in. I've received multi-minute voice messages & a dozen pictures & a map pin describing how to reach some rural places. While pins are generally shared over Google Maps, it should not be used for navigation. Waze is much better. For example, if I use Google Maps to navigate me to a friend's house 15 minutes away, Google Maps will have me cross a river to get there which is unnecessary.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Thank you.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    Google Maps is utterly bizarre here sometimes. 10 days ago I wanted to drive across the GAM from Heredia (The Ark, wonderful place) during rush hour, and Google Maps sent me on a legit loop off one of the highways through a neighborhood...and when we ended up back at the place we'd branched off from, it wanted to send us around a second time. I pulled over, switched to Waze, and all was much better.
leesalminen 4y ago
My family has been living in CR for a couple years now. Our official address is "$int meters southeast $someStationaryThing, $color house, $city_name, $county_name, $province_name, $postal_code". I've never met anyone in CR who knows their $postal_code, though they do exist. It's pretty funny when trying to give someone in the US our address. We usually just send a map pin and a couple pictures or paragraph description to people trying to get to our house.
VLM 4y ago
I worked at a telco a long time ago and was indirectly involved in the installation of a data line to Costa Rica and do not recall anything like the antics in the article. I would imagine its some kind of status symbol to have your company name be the street address, exactly like we have in the USA, "1 Apple Parkway" in Cupertino. As such everyone in power will want to keep their status symbol of having a "real" postal address, so the system can never be improved without total disruption of local power dynamics.
hamed2005 4y ago
We have a bit of a similar situation in Iran. People use landmarks and famous places (e.g. factories, bridges, ...) to give addresses. I remember 20-30 years ago we also had to draw a little sketch for the person to find the address. Now every house has a unique postal code, but you can still see things like: second alley next to the school, first dead end, 100 meters after the X junction even in the official postal addresses. You also see a couple of street and alley names appearing in one single address. It's like trying to help people navigate through a certain direction. I was shocked how short the addresses are when I moved to Europe :)
mcguire 4y ago
I live on County Road 24. But if I'm talking to someone who has lived around here all their life, they often won't recognize that; I have to also use the local name, Boy Scout Road (there is a Boy Scout camp at the end).
- vidanay 4y ago
  Probably not anymore...they have had to sell off the majority of their camps.
shaggie76 4y ago
Reminds of me "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708696/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708696/
zapdrive 4y ago
India says hi.
mdaniel 4y ago
Falsehoods programmers believe about Postal Addresses: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#postal-addresses https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#postal-addres...
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/welcome.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/welcome.htm And this is just the US postal system. The address system in my area is covered in Appendix D
kgeist 4y ago
>It’s next to the fig tree, the one that was cut down 20 years ago. It’s by the old market, which today is a parking lot We have a similar thing in my town (Eastern Europe). For example, one might say "let's meet near Elektron". Elektron is the name of an old electronics store in communist times, it's long gone but people still call the area "Elektron".
tatrajim 4y ago
This brings back memories of a visit some 20 years ago to Moganshan （莫干山） park in northwest Zhejiang province, China. There we ran across an amazingly lively and intelligent 11 year-old boy, who lived with his family nearby. We asked his mail address, and he wrote it down full: 莫干山大树下 [Mt. Mogan, under the big tree]. Asking around, this was indeed a valid postal address.
kneel 4y ago
I stayed there in college with a host family. My address was something ridiculous like 'the blue and yellow gate, 200 meters east of the duck pond'
Daub 4y ago
Here in Vietnam we have an interesting address system. Between main streets there are dense networks of very narrow streets, impassable to anything other than pedestrians. These are called hems and none of them have names. These hems are kind of fractal in nature. From a Main Street will branch a thick hem. From that will branch ten or more medium hems. From each of those will branch ten or more thin hems. House addressees are relative to the ‘root’ Main Street house number. Hence Phan Long 56/4/9/12. Locating these houses is always an adventure. It does not help that many of the hems are dead ends, but few are marked as such. Neither does it help that even Google maps gives up in the hems heartlands. It’s a real case of ‘you can’t get there from here’.
- btbuildem 4y ago
  Fractal, so infinitely scalable! So, Phan Long 56, then the 4th branch, then the 9th branch from that, then finally the 12th building?
  - Daub 4y ago
    Ahhh. I did not make myself clear. Apologies. The nested numbers refer to house numbers. A two order nest is easy enough. Its when it reaches five that things get weird.
btbuildem 4y ago
Honestly, it feels like GPS is the great leveller here. Regardless of where you're from, whether there are addresses or not (or even streets, for that matter), you can always count on "am I getting closer to or further from the dot?"
jononomo 4y ago
Go to the spot 500 meters north of where the conquistadors are said to have landed, then head east 300 meters to where there is no longer a papaya tree. Then turn left and look for where there used to be a sign for the horse ranch. The tan house (until it was repainted) is 700 meters east of there.

159 points by lsllc 4y ago

Not too different from Indian addresses. “Next to a temple xyz…”, or “Near Mother Dairy factory …” and so on. Also its not uncommon to come across two adjacent buildings to have significantly different addresses.

sakopov 4y ago

An example address in Costa Rica. Pretty wild. [1] > Mr. John Smith From St. Mark's Church, 50m to the west and 100m to the north, gray colored house San José, San José, Desamparados 30508 - Costa Rica [1] https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/costa-rica/housing/postal-system https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/costa-rica/housing/postal-s...

mbauman 4y ago
Nicaragua is similar, and in Managua it's even more convoluted with things like: > From where the old Franciscan church used to be, 2 blocks towards the lake and 1 block and 50m up Where you have to know a historical landmark, that "towards the lake" is North (even if the lake isn't in sight), and "up" is not up a hill but rather the direction in which the sun comes up.
- cossatot 4y ago
  20 years ago I used to occasionally ship tens of thousands of dollars of geophysical surveying equipment from Arkansas to the office of INETER (Nicaraguan governmental earth sciences division). The address was something like "INETER, frente del policlinica oriental, Managua, Nicaragua" (across from the Oriental polyclinic). And DHL would come through!
  - sakopov 4y ago
    Heh, last year I was renewing my car registration online and used an option in the system to send the license plate tags to a new address I recently moved to. I ended up fat-fingering the zip code and was really worried that they wouldn't arrive, but to my surprise new registration came to my new address a couple of days later. I can now see how such a small typo is a non-issue to a carrier that's dealing with routing issues like you're describing!
    - cafard 4y ago
      A number of vendors sell address correction software, and I imagine that the DMV can afford such a product.
  - jessekv 4y ago
    In Spanish, 'oriental' is the east compass direction, and 'occidental' is the west compass direction. I would translate it to "the East Polyclinic".
    - PTcartelsLOL 4y ago
      Eastern and oriental are kind-of synonymous in Portuguese and I bet in most Latin languages.
- aaronharnly 4y ago
  I've read in a book (which I can't recall the name of) that many of the informal landmarks in Managua were destroyed in the earthquake of 1972, yet remain in use as addresses.
bombcar 4y ago
There's an old joke in the US that getting directions in a rural area is like this "go down the old road until you get to the place the red barn used to be, then take a right past where the old pasture was, take a left at the first dirt road, can't miss it".
- eatsyourtacos 4y ago
  I live in a semi-rural area and my wife tells me how to get to places in relations to the animals I'll pass. "Take a left at the cows, then keep going but if you hit the llamas you've gone too far."
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I'm in a similar area and I'm always a bit surprised how well those types of descriptions work - I'm looking at it and going "this is a parse error, there's no way" and then I start driving and I'm like "yeah, the only way to describe this is 'left at the cows'."
  - buildsjets 4y ago
    I have several times given directions to an aerospace testing facility, with instructions to "Turn left at the miniature horse farm, but if you pass Frank's Deer Urine, you've gone too far and missed it." https://www.flickr.com/photos/93733769@N03/11848099843 https://www.flickr.com/photos/93733769@N03/11848099843
    - aaronharnly 4y ago
      Honesty it’s just a sweet pleasure seeing a sign with a phone number without area code.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  In my town, lots of people provide directions via "the Old High School" -- which I later learned is the current middle school. Funny how this stuff develops.
- 4y ago
ricardobayes 4y ago
Had a house in Spain that had a similar address, officially the address was something like "unknown street 1A", so for all deliveries I needed to specify as "the yellow house by this and this road just outside the town". The couriers got almost always lost, so I had to add them to whatsapp and send the location.

ninju 4y ago

If you need to deliver some official documentation to some in Costa Rica it's gotta be tough I wonder how DHL, FedEx and other delivery services handle it.

AdrianB1 4y ago
They hire local people that know the system and can navigate it. When I was in CR navigating was not simple, but I always got where I wanted to be. In a way it was interesting as very precise time was not possible, I think that makes people a lot more relaxed - probably "relaxed" is the best way to describe my work colleagues in CR.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  > I think that makes people a lot more relaxed - probably "relaxed" is the best way to describe my work colleagues in CR. It's one of many reasons Costa Ricans tend to appear very "relaxed". The national motto is "Pura Vida", which translates to Pure Life. It can be used to say hello, goodbye, yes, no, maybe, anything really :). My wife and I use it whenever things don't happen as planned to us in CR. Like when the electrician says he'll be here 9 AM Monday, that translates to "sometime next week".
  - sethrin 4y ago
    People tell you what you want to hear, because it's rude otherwise. You get all kinds of wrong directions too, because people want to be seen as helpful even if they don't know. When people tell you something will be done on $day, it is sure as sunrise that it absolutely will not be done that day, and probably not that week, and maybe not that month. People make do, and don't stress too much -- pura vida!
marymkearney 4y ago
Sending law clients original documents (USCIS approval notices, etc.), was always a nail-biter. Shout-out to DHL, which never missed one. Still we'd keep hitting refresh on the tracking # till it was delivered. Sounds a little easier now.

spenczar5 4y ago

The article asks an interesting question, and then totally fails to answer it. I want to know more!

rascul 4y ago
It's briefly answered: > The explanation came from Geovanny Campos of Correos de Costa Rica, the company that manages the country's postal service. As he told Luis Fernando, San José’s growth was characterized by disorder. As the city expanded without following a pattern of rectangular city blocks, the established street numbers stopped making sense. > Eventually, nobody used them. Although it doesn't seem like much of an answer.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Many places, especially in South America and adjacent, have expanded WAY FASTER than the (slow) bureaucracy can handle. Houses get built on streets that don't exist in any official planning document, such that the water supply can't even keep up and water has to be brought in by truck or you have to store it in cisterns and have pumps. In the USA we're used to grids being laid out when there are even no streets (see towns like California City: https://www.wired.com/story/california-ghost-metropolis-gallery/ https://www.wired.com/story/california-ghost-metropolis-gall... ) but that is not universal.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    > Houses get built on streets well somebody is doing it... if they bothered to build a whole house, how hard is it to assign a number to it? Sounds like a chaotic nightmare and not nearly as cute nostalgic as the article tries to make it.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It's not hard to assign a number to a house, but you need to know a name for the street, and the person who can assign the name has to fill out the paperwork, but then the central government will ask what the @#$@# they are doing adding a street without doing X Y and Z, and so on. What's interesting with Costa Rica is they apparently never formalize; in Mexico a similar thing would occur but at some point actual street names would get added. Then again mail delivery in Mexico at the time was quite sporadic, hardly done at all (companies like the electric company would hand-deliver bills from their own couriers).

gorbypark 4y ago

Something like What Three Words could be useful there. If someone came up with an open solution, using Spanish words, maybe it would catch on?

elil17 4y ago
Google's plus codes are open source and probably more useful than What Three Words: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ I think they are a better solution because they are hierarchical (removing the right most character of the code gives you a larger region encompassing the longer code) - that means that nearby places will have codes with similar prefixes. They also exclude visually similar characters, making them easy to read and handwrite.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The huge HUGE disadvantage to both is you need something with an internet connection, or at least a database, to find where you're going. Whereas anyone who can understand the language and is in the area can find "the red house behind the hospital".
  - elil17 4y ago
    Unless the hospital doesn't exist anymore, as mentioned in the article. Then you'd need local knowledge.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > removing the right most character of the code gives you a larger region encompassing the longer code When I tried that, Google just told me it didn't recognize the code. Is it a recognized method or just a useful attribute for human interpretation?
  - elil17 4y ago
    I oversimplified this, sorry. You have to pad the plus code so that the segment to the left of the plus has enough characters, and there are a couple other rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

TrainedMonkey 4y ago

> Every address in Costa Rica is in relation to something else, and sometimes to things that no longer exist. > My apartment, for instance, is three houses down from the local high school. The high school’s official address is 300 meters east of the elementary school. The elementary school’s address is across the street from the church — or next to the bar, depending on your piety. > That comes at a cost: A 2010 study found that informal addresses cost Costa Rica $720 million annually due to lost mail and lost productivity. And how many lives could be saved if ambulances (or police, or firefighters) were dispatched to precise locations? > “One reason that changes are so tough to implement is that the old way is dearly beloved,” wrote author Katherine Stanley Obando. “It’s a language, an insider’s code.” My read is because it was always this way, people are resistant to change, and whatever pain is caused by this is tolerable.

cultureswitch 4y ago
You haven't read the whole article. The most bewildering thing about this is that they used to have formal addresses in the past.
- helloayo 4y ago
  They probably had formal addresses but used informal directions. They do this in my grandmother's small town. No one will give you an actual address despite having one.
  - TrainedMonkey 4y ago
    Concur, from reading the article I got that formal system was officially instituted and put in the books, but nobody used it. Trying to verify this by Googling only brought existence of formal addresses to light... which is what author was suggesting. Fascinating aspect of this is dominance of structured, but ultimately useless* information on the internet. * - as claimed by the author, as noted above I was not able to get a clear picture after ~5 minutes of Googling.

cultureswitch 4y ago

I should show this to the cute UX developers who think having anything more structured than a "country" field and an "address" field in a worldwide address form makes any sense.

stronglikedan 4y ago
First, show it to the shipping providers who require all the discrete address fields.
kristopolous 4y ago
"if the customer selects Costa Rica, they get a 6 row freeform textarea and the submit button label becomes Person Shrugging, U+1F937"
popcalc 4y ago
https://www.lob.com/blog/autocomplete-and-verify-address-with-react-components https://www.lob.com/blog/autocomplete-and-verify-address-wit... Very few companies should roll their own if they're not in the logistics business themselves.

pomatic 4y ago

I think No. 1, London might be close? IIRC it's Clarence House/What was or is King Charles' residence.

tenpies 4y ago
Not sure about London, but I've always gotten a kick out of Neil Oliver's mail, which manages to arrive despite some of the oddest addresses: Without even a name: https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1628434030919049221 https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1628434030919049221 With name, but only the city as far as usable address information: https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1631313939198877696 https://twitter.com/thecoastguy/status/1631313939198877696 Now granted, he is a TV presenter and Stirling is a small town (sub 100,000 people), but there is some romanticism behind a letter only arriving because some person in the mail sorting facility has some faint idea of who you are.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  If you pay your postal workers well enough that they care about their job, you don't need any formal addressing beyond getting the letter to the right person. A postal code can be enough in some cases! Back in the day, the mailman knew how to find every house in his area. With larger cities you'll probably need more mailpeople, but there's no reason why it this system can't work today. It is working in Costa Rica, at least. Automated systems and digital catalogues are expensive to set up and a pain to maintain. If you live in a remote village of 1000 people, a place name and a last name are often all you need to get your mail delivered. In your example, a Stirling is a town of 38k people. Names may not be enough for everyone, but house names and descriptions will certainly do the job. All the sorting facility needs to do is make sure the mail ends up in Stirling and let the mail handle itself from there!
- schoen 4y ago
  I met Cleto Pavanetto, who was the head of the Vatican's Latinitas Foundation, around 2008. (Our only common language was Latin!) https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto He told me that he could receive mail addressed only to Cletus Vatican That's the shortest address (?) Of anyone I've met, I think!

nsenifty 4y ago

This is true to a large extent in India. My childhood home address in a very small town was something like "person name, behind government hospital, town". Even in the cities, depending on the city, it is usually a combination of number and cross streets (e.g. #50, 5th Main, 6th cross). If you aren't familiar with the area, there are ten different 5th mains and it is always a bit of a crap shoot finding the right one.

orangepurple 4y ago

This is a solved problem. https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code There are other similar systems out there too.

rootusrootus 4y ago
My house could be any one of about 130 plus codes. Do I just choose the one that corresponds with my front door? I suppose as a practical matter any of the codes would get someone close enough that a visitor could figure out the rest on their own, but it does introduce some ambiguity about what my address really is.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  You need to use the longer plus code variant and aim it at your front door. If the structure has multiple dwelling units you need an apartment number after the plus code. Problem solved. Plus codes are derived from latitude and longitude coordinates, so they already exist everywhere. They are similar in length to a telephone number – 849VCWC8+R9, for example – but can often be shortened to only four or six digits when combined with a locality (CWC8+R9, Mountain View).
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    I read the question as the opposite -- that the poster's property covers 130 plus codes, so which one do you pick? It does strike me as quite non-obvious what is the proper level of precision. If you own a ranch, are you pointing to the middle of the ranch far away from the house on its corner, or are you pointing to the house itself, but which is also almost next to the house on the neighboring ranch? Places aren't points and they also aren't areas that fit into pre-existing grids. In reality they tend to be quite irregular shapes whose conceptual "landmark" point (front door, lobby, reception area) is often far away from their geometrical "center of gravity".
    - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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paxys 4y ago

The surest sign of a failed system is people in power justifying it as "this is our culture". You could send a letter with a formal address in San Jose 30 years ago and it would get delivered. Today it likely will not. This has nothing to do with culture or nostalgia, but rather a breakdown in urban planning and failing to deal with population growth.

hadlock 4y ago
My uncle used to live on an old ranch road in west Texas. It didn't really go anywhere just connected to larger roads together, probably 20 miles long and kind of wound through a couple of minor valleys. Eventually all the road frontage on that road slowly got sliced up in to parcels for mini-ranches of 30-90 acres, the county sort of numbering them as they went along. Eventually the numbering system on that road got so messed up, someone called for an ambulance and died because the ambulance couldn't find the house. A month later the county formally renumbered the whole road and each mailbox has a bright new blue 6x12" "house number" reflective sign. This meant they had to go through the property records and redraw all the plats with the new labels. I don't have any idea how a city or country can do any kind of property taxation without formal addresses. Or a census. Or transfer of Real Property. There must not exist any kind of title insurance because without property and tax records you can't keep track of who owns what. I'm curious if the author consulted the tax office because street names are critical to the relation of ownership of property to physical location. Occasionally property records will reference "iron spike at corner of property" but those aren't definitive and move/get lost. Streets rarely change location or get lost.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  I own property in Costa Rica. From what I understand, property records, taxes & ownership were a huge problem up until ~10 years ago when all the disparate property record systems were merged into a nationalized, computerized, property record system. To pay my property taxes, I just log into my county's website and pay with a Visa card. It's very easy. Our property record uses GPS coordinates and relative distances from those points to determine the boundaries of the property. It's common to have the surveyors with their fancy laser & GPS machines come out during due diligence in a real estate transaction. It feels pretty similar to the rest of the world now, though it hasn't always been this way.

renewiltord 4y ago

Interestingly, Indian addresses have both the formal and the hint method. https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/india/housing/postal-system https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/india/housing/postal-system Same, non-grid city growth, but somehow the formal addresses held here.

ortusdux 4y ago

Several groups have 'solved' this issue by making more human readable coordinate systems. IIRC, What3Words kicked things off, but there were licensing and regional issues that slowed adoption. I personally like Google's free and open source Plus Codes. You can vary the precision by adding more digits to the location: "The precision of a plus code is indicated by the number of digits after the "+" sign. Two digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 13.7 by 13.7 meters; Three digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 2.7 by 3.5 meters; Four digits after the plus sign is an area roughly 0.5 by 0.8 meters." https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/learn/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/learn/

VLM 4y ago
MGRS military grid reference system works the same way, more digits more precision. There's a mil-sci-fi novel (forgot name, can't google) where some artillery officer thinks its funny to be a dick and give out ten digit grids "because he can" whereas normal humans mostly use 8 digit grids (like you'd use in a 9-line). I thought that book reference was funny because I'd give out ten digits for the LOLs when I was in the Army. Everyone who gets access to Y or M-code DGPS for the first time has to be a joker LOL. 8 digits is good enough to park a car, 10 digits is good enough to specify an individual theater seat (roughly) GPS is like TV where most people consider it magic and don't care how it works, but if you're of a technical bent there's an infinitely deep rabbit hole to dive into.
- myself248 4y ago
  Civilian L1+L2+DGPS is like that now. I can specify my left footprint differently from my right footprint and the difference is meaningful.
crazygringo 4y ago
Plus codes are now nearly a decade old. I always thought they were a cool idea, but has anybody actually started using them as part of everyday life? Not as a novelty extra, but actually a main productivity flow for anything? Seems like usually when people need to send an exact location short-term then send a pin from Google/Apple Maps. While reference works use traditional lat/lon. It did always seem to me that they'd work well as a kind of foundation for postal codes, in places without regular addresses -- exactly what you seem to be suggesting here. But has any country or municipality done so?

fallinghawks 4y ago

Carmel, California does not have street addresses either. It's a small place https://ci.carmel.ca.us/post/addresses https://ci.carmel.ca.us/post/addresses

r00fus 4y ago
We visited recently and I was tickled by how many of the homes had their names prominent from the sidewalk. Seemed like a cute meme, but this info makes it clear it's for postal deliveries and guests too.
popcalc 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ib4butj0b0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ib4butj0b0

hadlock 4y ago

We went to Costa Rica for a week, was planning on getting engaged there. Had heard all the stories of how beautiful it was, etc. Rented a car and drove up the mountain all the tourists go to. In most cases Costa Rica was as expensive if not moreso than the Bay Area. This really spoke to me: > Costa Rica’s streets are in awful shape, traffic is terrible, and the addresses mean no one knows exactly where they’re going — so Ticos always have an excuse to be late. I've been to many, many countries, driven in about half of them; the main road from the capital to the main tourist mountain is in awful shape. Driving at night is super sketchy not because of crime but simply because the roads are (barely) carved into the side of hills, frequently a single lane, and no paint markings of any kind, especially on the side of the road. This makes driving at night on black, wet asphalt a real chore to even stay on the road. The reason I mention price is that for what they charge tourists, the tourism infrastructure (pretty much the road link between the airport and the mountain) is abysmal. We ended up getting engaged elsewhere. Costa Rica is a beautiful country with wonderful people but it's not for me.

therein 4y ago
I drove all over Costa Rica for a week, we were trying to go to a zoo or something but ended up in Nicaraguan border after getting lost.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
huhtenberg 4y ago
For the exact opposite road experience visit Iceland.
- hadlock 4y ago
  I was pleasantly surprised by the roads in Malaysia. We were doing the equivalent of 80MPH on the main N-S road between Kuala Lumpur and Penang and dudes would blow past us in a Toyota Hi-Ace minivan doing 100MPH. Some of the best roads I've ever driven on, even better than the roads in Texas. Heading up into the mountains to see the tea plantations, even the secondary roads were at least two lanes and well marked, but well maintained, even if it was impossible to pass slow-moving trucks.

gumby 4y ago

What a bias as to what is “real” and not real about an address. Are addresses in Utah not “real”? When Australia required that buildings be assigned a street number my grandmother simply ignored the rule: never posted a number on the gate and continued to use her house name, until she passed away more than four decades later. Was her use not “real”?

alar44 4y ago
[dead]
CharlesW 4y ago
TFA uses "real" to mean "formal" address systems.
helloayo 4y ago
agree

simlevesque 4y ago

It's hard to get around at first but the locals will help you greatly in my experience.

duxup 4y ago

How does this work for say looking up map directions in a maps app?

leesalminen 4y ago
Normally the place you're going to just sends you a pin in Google Maps/Waze. Or you set the closest landmark and then use the descriptive address to self-navigate from there. Or you call the place as you get close and have them guide you in. I've received multi-minute voice messages & a dozen pictures & a map pin describing how to reach some rural places. While pins are generally shared over Google Maps, it should not be used for navigation. Waze is much better. For example, if I use Google Maps to navigate me to a friend's house 15 minutes away, Google Maps will have me cross a river to get there which is unnecessary.
- duxup 4y ago
  Thank you.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  Google Maps is utterly bizarre here sometimes. 10 days ago I wanted to drive across the GAM from Heredia (The Ark, wonderful place) during rush hour, and Google Maps sent me on a legit loop off one of the highways through a neighborhood...and when we ended up back at the place we'd branched off from, it wanted to send us around a second time. I pulled over, switched to Waze, and all was much better.

leesalminen 4y ago

My family has been living in CR for a couple years now. Our official address is "$int meters southeast $someStationaryThing, $color house, $city_name, $county_name, $province_name, $postal_code". I've never met anyone in CR who knows their $postal_code, though they do exist. It's pretty funny when trying to give someone in the US our address. We usually just send a map pin and a couple pictures or paragraph description to people trying to get to our house.

VLM 4y ago

I worked at a telco a long time ago and was indirectly involved in the installation of a data line to Costa Rica and do not recall anything like the antics in the article. I would imagine its some kind of status symbol to have your company name be the street address, exactly like we have in the USA, "1 Apple Parkway" in Cupertino. As such everyone in power will want to keep their status symbol of having a "real" postal address, so the system can never be improved without total disruption of local power dynamics.

hamed2005 4y ago

We have a bit of a similar situation in Iran. People use landmarks and famous places (e.g. factories, bridges, ...) to give addresses. I remember 20-30 years ago we also had to draw a little sketch for the person to find the address. Now every house has a unique postal code, but you can still see things like: second alley next to the school, first dead end, 100 meters after the X junction even in the official postal addresses. You also see a couple of street and alley names appearing in one single address. It's like trying to help people navigate through a certain direction. I was shocked how short the addresses are when I moved to Europe :)

mcguire 4y ago

I live on County Road 24. But if I'm talking to someone who has lived around here all their life, they often won't recognize that; I have to also use the local name, Boy Scout Road (there is a Boy Scout camp at the end).

vidanay 4y ago
Probably not anymore...they have had to sell off the majority of their camps.

shaggie76 4y ago

Reminds of me "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708696/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708696/

zapdrive 4y ago

India says hi.

mdaniel 4y ago

Falsehoods programmers believe about Postal Addresses: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#postal-addresses https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#postal-addres...

Kon-Peki 4y ago
https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/welcome.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/welcome.htm And this is just the US postal system. The address system in my area is covered in Appendix D

kgeist 4y ago

>It’s next to the fig tree, the one that was cut down 20 years ago. It’s by the old market, which today is a parking lot We have a similar thing in my town (Eastern Europe). For example, one might say "let's meet near Elektron". Elektron is the name of an old electronics store in communist times, it's long gone but people still call the area "Elektron".

tatrajim 4y ago

This brings back memories of a visit some 20 years ago to Moganshan （莫干山） park in northwest Zhejiang province, China. There we ran across an amazingly lively and intelligent 11 year-old boy, who lived with his family nearby. We asked his mail address, and he wrote it down full: 莫干山大树下 [Mt. Mogan, under the big tree]. Asking around, this was indeed a valid postal address.

kneel 4y ago

I stayed there in college with a host family. My address was something ridiculous like 'the blue and yellow gate, 200 meters east of the duck pond'

Daub 4y ago

Here in Vietnam we have an interesting address system. Between main streets there are dense networks of very narrow streets, impassable to anything other than pedestrians. These are called hems and none of them have names. These hems are kind of fractal in nature. From a Main Street will branch a thick hem. From that will branch ten or more medium hems. From each of those will branch ten or more thin hems. House addressees are relative to the ‘root’ Main Street house number. Hence Phan Long 56/4/9/12. Locating these houses is always an adventure. It does not help that many of the hems are dead ends, but few are marked as such. Neither does it help that even Google maps gives up in the hems heartlands. It’s a real case of ‘you can’t get there from here’.

btbuildem 4y ago
Fractal, so infinitely scalable! So, Phan Long 56, then the 4th branch, then the 9th branch from that, then finally the 12th building?
- Daub 4y ago
  Ahhh. I did not make myself clear. Apologies. The nested numbers refer to house numbers. A two order nest is easy enough. Its when it reaches five that things get weird.

btbuildem 4y ago

Honestly, it feels like GPS is the great leveller here. Regardless of where you're from, whether there are addresses or not (or even streets, for that matter), you can always count on "am I getting closer to or further from the dot?"

jononomo 4y ago

Go to the spot 500 meters north of where the conquistadors are said to have landed, then head east 300 meters to where there is no longer a papaya tree. Then turn left and look for where there used to be a sign for the horse ranch. The tan house (until it was repainted) is 700 meters east of there.