Editorial Note: In April, I took a month off in Medellin. For me, this meant an interesting and diverting month. For you, this means 30 days of posts about my vacation. I’ll try to make them somewhat amusing.
Google Maps is a pretty impressive application. In the US. In Medellin, it’s somewhat less impressive. In the US, Google Maps is an all-singing, all-dancing route-planning, street-viewing interactive tour-de-force. In Medellin (more accurately: for Medellin) Google Maps is a … pretty nice computerized map. But street view isn’t supported. And route planning doesn’t work. And while there is satellite imagery, it’s all pretty low-res. Most significantly of all, however: You can pretty much forget about typing in an address and being shown where it is. Oh, you may be shown a map location … but it won’t necessarily correspond to the address you typed in.
Cabbies
To be fair, this isn’t entirely Google’s fault. (Well, it is their fault, but they’re up against a hard problem.) Medellin is a massive maze, its peculiar layout a result of its topography (hilly) and history (undisturbed organic growth). To illustrate: An interesting feature of this place is that cabbies tend not to know where they’re going. If your destination isn’t a major landmark, a street address isn’t necessarily going to get you where you want to go; you’d better know how to get there yourself, so that you can give the cabbie directions.
Addresses
A quick word about how Medellin’s streets are named, and how its addresses work. The vast majority of streets are called Calles or Carreras, and assigned a number. Calles run (more or less) E/W, while Carreras run (more or less) N/S. Calles are commonly abbreviated C, while Carreras are identified with a K. Carreras generally increase in number from East to West (i.e., K1 is on the east side of the city), while Calles generally increase in number from South to North. Except — ho, ho, ho — there are also the Calle Surs, which increase in number from North to South. The switch happens around Calle 1, so you can think of the Calle Surs as Calles with “negative” numbers. Just for fun they like to throw in the occasional letter modifier (e.g., C1A, K43B) to identify a street. Oh, and two (or more) streets with the same name aren’t necessarily contiguous.
Addresses look something like: Calle (or Carrera) XX YY-ZZ. In such an address:
- XX is the number of the street on which the address is found
- YY is the number of the nearest cross-street
- ZZ is the number of meters from that cross-street
Welcome to Colombia.
