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> 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 dow
by 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 agoYou 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 agoThey 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 agoConcur, 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.