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Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

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-s...

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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.

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!

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!

A number of vendors sell address correction software, and I imagine that the DMV can afford such a product.

In Spanish, 'oriental' is the east compass direction, and 'occidental' is the west compass direction.

I would translate it to "the East Polyclinic".

Eastern and oriental are kind-of synonymous in Portuguese and I bet in most Latin languages.

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.

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".

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."

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'."

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

Honesty it’s just a sweet pleasure seeing a sign with a phone number without area code.

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.

The very first time I went to visit my grandfather on my own in my own car, I was given these directions: "head down 130 until about 5 miles before where the drive-thru was".

(a) It hadn't been there for more than 25 years before this

(b) BEFORE it?

I remember a story my parents told as a kid about someone asking for directions to the local amusement park and being told, "Take such-and-such a road, it's the first castle on the left."

The person giving the directions forgot that the county prison was also on that road and is also a castle!

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0395107,-76.2926349,3a,34.4y...

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0269921,-76.2184577,3a,75y,2...

Better than directions in New Jersey: "turn right at the Wawa, turn left at the next Wawa, then make a right at the next Wawa".

Sounds like getting directions in Boston.

"Keep going straight. At the third Dunkin's bang a left. Go by two Dunkin's and it'll be on your right."

"What's the road called?"

"I have no idea, I only ever walk, parking sucks."

I suspect most people know the name of the street they live on, a major crossroad near it, and not much beyond that - unless the streets are numbered.

Denver has a pretty regular system: north-south streets west of the Capitol are alphabetic series, as are those starting about two miles east of the Capitol. East-west streets north of Exposition are numbered, but from Exposition south one had to know them. At this point, after about forty-five years away, I know where Evans and Hampden are, and that's about it.

Happened to me in Sicily a few years ago - we needed to get to a friend's place and everyone's directions were "the third house on the right after you cross the level crossing". We had no idea where the level crossing was but eventually got the number and street name from someone which the Tomtom had no trouble finding.

My personal favorite are the prescient directions "turn right about a mile before the creek"

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.

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