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Comment by mbauman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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