Somewhere in this lakeside Central American town, there\u2019s a woman who lives beside a yellow car. But it\u2019s not her car. It\u2019s her address. If you were to write to her, this is where you would send the letter: \u201cFrom where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua.\u201d<\/p>\n
Try squeezing that onto the back of a postcard. Come to that, try putting yourself in the place of the letter carriers who have to deliver such unruly epistles. How, for example, would they know where the Chinese restaurant used to be if it isn\u2019t there anymore? How would they know which way is \u201cdown,\u201d considering that \u201cdown,\u201d as employed by people in these parts, could as easily mean \u201cup\u201d?<\/p>\n
How would they know which way the lake lies, when most of the time\u2014in this topsy-turvy capital, punctured by the tall green craters of half a dozen ancient volcanoes\u2014they cannot even see the lake? Finally, how would they know where the yellow car is parked, if its owner happens to be out for a spin?<\/p>\n
Somewhere in this lakeside Central American town, there\u2019s a woman who lives beside a yellow car. But it\u2019s not her car. It\u2019s her address. If you were to write to her, this is where you would send the letter: \u201cFrom where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua.\u201d<\/p>\n
Try squeezing that onto the back of a postcard. Come to that, try putting yourself in the place of the letter carriers who have to deliver such unruly epistles. How, for example, would they know where the Chinese restaurant used to be if it isn\u2019t there anymore? How would they know which way is \u201cdown,\u201d considering that \u201cdown,\u201d as employed by people in these parts, could as easily mean \u201cup\u201d?<\/p>\n
How would they know which way the lake lies, when most of the time\u2014in this topsy-turvy capital, punctured by the tall green craters of half a dozen ancient volcanoes\u2014they cannot even see the lake? Finally, how would they know where the yellow car is parked, if its owner happens to be out for a spin?<\/p>\n
Somehow, the people who live here have figured these things out. Granted, they\u2019ve had practice. After all, most Managua street addresses take this cumbersome and inscrutable form. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a real street map,\u201d concedes Manuel Estrada Borge, vice president of the Nicaragua Chamber of Commerce, \u201cso we have an amusing little system that no one from anywhere else can understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Welcome to Managua, quite possibly the only place on Earth where upward of 2 million people manage to live, work, and play\u2014not to mention find their way around\u2014in a city where the streets have no names.<\/p>\n
No numbers, either. Well, that isn\u2019t quite true. A few Managua streets do indeed have conventional names. Some houses even have numbers. But no one hereabouts ever uses them. Why bother? Managuans have their own amusing little system to sort these matters out, a system that has the amusing little side-effect of driving most visitors crazy.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor people who\u2019ve just come here,\u201d says a long-time Canadian resident of the city, \u201cthere\u2019s no way on God\u2019s Earth that they\u2019d know what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Managuans are talking about, when all is said and done, is an earthquake that shattered this city three decades ago. Before that time, Managua was an urban conglomeration much like any other, at least in the sense that it had a recognizable center. It also had streets that ran east and west or north and south, and those streets not infrequently bore names. And numbers.<\/p>\n
But then, on Dec. 23, 1972, the seismological fault lines that zigzag beneath Managua shifted and buckled, with horrific results. Upward of 20,000 people were killed in the quake, and the city was pretty much reduced to rubble. The catastrophe thoroughly disrupted the old grid pattern of Managua\u2019s streets, so the city\u2019s surviving residents were obliged to devise a new way of locating things. They started with a landmark\u2014a certain tree, for example, or a pharmacy or a plaza or a soft-drink bottling plant\u2014and they went from there.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, for example, if you wished to visit the small Canadian Consulate in Managua, you would present yourself at the following address: De Los Pipitos, dos cuadras abajo. In English, this means: From Los Pipitos, two blocks down.<\/p>\n
Any self-respecting inhabitant of Managua knows that \u201cLos Pipitos\u201d refers to a child-welfare agency whose headquarters are located a little south of the Tiscapa Lagoon. Managuans also know that abajo, in this context, does not mean \u201cdown\u201d in a topographical sense. It means \u201cwest,\u201d because the sun goes down in the west. (By the same token, in Managua street talk, \u201carriba,\u201d or \u201cup,\u201d means \u201ceast.\u201d Al lago, which literally means \u201cto the lake,\u201d is how Managuans say \u201cto the north.\u201d For some inexplicable reason, when they want to say \u201cto the south,\u201d Managuans say \u201cal sur,\u201d which means \u201cto the south.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Just to make a complicated process even more perplexing, Managuans, who normally use the metric system, will often give directions by employing an ancient Spanish unit of measurement called the vara. They will say, \u201cFrom the little tree, two blocks to the south, 50 varas to the east.\u201d Visitors will therefore need to know how long a vara is (0.847 meters). They will also need to know that the \u201clittle tree\u201d is no longer little. It is actually quite tall.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, the Nicaraguan postal agency considered scrapping the jerry-rigged system of street addresses. But nothing came of the project. Besides, the scheme actually does seem to work. Nedelka Aguilar, for example, has learned that you merely have to have a little faith. Born in Nicaragua, she left as a young girl and spent most of her youth in southern Ontario. Now she lives in Managua once more.<\/p>\n
Shortly after her return four years ago, she arranged to visit a woman who dwelled at that outlandish address\u2014\u201cFrom where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked.\u201d By this time, Aguilar spoke the Managua dialect of street addresses well enough to take in the gist of this information. But what about that yellow car?<\/p>\n
\u201cI said to the woman, \u2018How will I find you if the yellow car isn\u2019t there?\u2019 \u201d Aguilar smiles and shakes her head at the memory. \u201cThe woman laughed. She said, \u2018The yellow car is always there.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Somewhere in this lakeside Central American town, there\u2019s a woman who lives beside a yellow car. But it\u2019s not her car. It\u2019s her address. If you were to write to her, this is where you would send the letter: \u201cFrom where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","spay_email":""},"categories":[11,26],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}