This European city center has no street names

Sounds like you’ve been to UT campus just off Dean Keaton recently.

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I visit Costa Rica regularly and have had the same experience. One place I stayed was “300m west of [mom-and-pop bar]” on a certain road. Another in an urban area was identified in part by a tree out front. There are streets with names, but they rarely have numbers. It’s an adjustment.

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I used to live a few blocks within that area actually (love the Crown & Anchor and i recommend The Varsity for their amazing pizza, they’re jsut up the street), there’s a really terrible intersection on 51st & Duval that i actively avoid.

51st

And this next one is genuinely a 4 way intersection with a traffic light and it sucks getting stuck at it. So i actively avoid this:

wat

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Costa Rica’s landmark address solution sounds allot like West Virginia because a landmark answer is what you will get when you ask for directions in the mountain state.

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“Naw, you turned too soon, I said go left at the real big tree. Yeah, I know you thought that tree was big, but there’s a bigger one coming.”

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People always ask us how to get places in Prospect Park, our answer is always something like: “go under the tunnel, and follow the path past the boathouse, then…ask someone else, they’ll help you with the next leg…”

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One of my uncles has an address very much like that.

A friend of mine lives in a decent sized town (of about 8000 people) where the streets have names but they are utterly unused except to give to mapping systems. Instead, every building is uniquely numbered and that’s all that’s used by the people who live there.

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I’m still quasi-traumatised by my first (in my car) visit to Mannheim. It’s not just that the grid streets are numbered, but due to some Bomber Harris-related action in September 1943, most of the buildings in the grid were flattened and the post-War replacements all look the same…so it’s hard to orient oneself with obvious landmarks. Eventually found the car. In case you were wondering.

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just as true in North America!

Dublin might as well not have street names.

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What3Words

Living in rural wales, I cannot wait for the day breakdown companies etc start using what3words.

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Salt Lake City will hold you to its boring bosom.

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Could be worse. In Paderborn, nearly all the streets are called “Eingangstrasse”.

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It was the same when I was living in Ausfahrt.

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Oh, it’s soooo much fun listening to programmers talk about what they think everyone should adopt in terms of time and date systems… I mean, it would be unlivable, but so much easier to program for!

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China is very similar. I think every building may have a number, but it’s a secret. They’re generally not posted, and no one knows what they are. Add in the fact that establishments are constantly moving around to avoid ever increasing rents (no rent control here) and it can be hard to find places.

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Hang on, this is really, really excellent:

Turns out really.really.excellent is near the confluence of the Xijiang and Beijiang rivers.

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