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Fun one: Costa Rican addresses are still often relative to a landmark. I used to have a subcontractor there, and his address was something like "500m north of t
by FL410 2mo ago
Fun one: Costa Rican addresses are still often relative to a landmark. I used to have a subcontractor there, and his address was something like "500m north of the old church" (which IIRC wasn't even there anymore). It was kinda hard to figure out how to get this into the DHL website, but it always made it there.
- ianbicking 2mo agoI remember in San José and maybe other Costa Rican cities with a street number system where even/odd were used for the cardinal directions. Calles (streets) run N/S, Avenidas (avenues) run E/W, and odd is east or north. So Calle 8 Avenida 7 is in the northwest. I also remember finding it helpful in theory but not very helpful in practice since the rest of the addressing wasn't normalized. I also recall more than one Latin American city where they ran the numbers up one-by-one, and this didn't scale over the decades or centuries, so they renumbered... just meaning that every house had two numbers, and people used both.
- itintheory 2mo agoI learned about this when standing at the customs counter in San Jose at two in the morning. I had an address for an AirBnB but the address as given didn't come up in google maps, or the system used by customs. They wanted to know where we were staying, and it was a bit of a sticking point. Eventually we were able to whatsapp the host and got a different way of addressing it that worked. Quite a memorable encounter.
- vhcr 2mo agoThere was a study a decade or so ago, where they found Costa Rica loses around $720M annually due to productivity loses due to their address system. https://archive.is/qvgOI https://archive.is/qvgOI