introduce you to my blogging and life 
We live in a world of precision and ours is a life of numbers and data. Things have to be by-the-book, there are methods and guidelines for just about everything and formatting, more than ever, rules. The postal system as we know it, is no exception. It’s common knowledge that if one wants a letter to arrive, one follows very a strict recipe, arguably tinted by national habits but nevertheless rather rigid and border-proof. Name first. Title. Company. Apartment. Civic number. Street name. City. Postal Code. Country. Planet. Etc.
And then there’s Costa Rica. Believe it or not, until a couple of years ago, Costa Rica hadn’t yet embraced the otherwise worldwide convention of assigning to houses a street number and an address. Not even in most of the Capital San Jose - and I saw this with my own eyes, or rather I failed to see it because there were neither street names nor numbers! The result? One did not live at 123 SomeStreet but rather at SomeStreet, 30 meters West and 65 meters South of SomeAvenue. That’s right, they labeled their addresses with a reference - in distance - to a landmark!
Now it would seem that a reform is under way; the national postal service, Correos de Costa Rica, has ambitiously begun assigning alphanumeric addresses to the Capital’s houses and 
buildings. As a result, one now lives at something like Av8-Ca15-#15. Yeah, I can hear a few fingers scratching as many heads. It’s definitely not the easiest way to convert a country to progress. What the above really means is that you live on 8th Ave, 15 meters from the closest lowest intersection which is 15th Street... Gulp. I think the Switzerland of Central America has a long way to go...
Any way, this new system hasn’t reached the outskirts yet and the letter I received today from el muy estimado Señor Andres González Suárez, a Costarricense student in tourism very courageously asking me for a job, was labeled creatively without a postal code, but it’s the return address that poured sunshine in my day. I’ll translate for those of you who don’t espeaka’ eSpanish - bare with me, Don Estorbo:
50 meters North and 100 meters East
of the Heredia Cemetery, Last
House left-hand side.
Costa Rica.
Now is that poetic or what?
By the way, I don’t have a job for Andres but if you own a business in Canada and are willing to legally hire a Tico on a temporary work permit, drop him a note. Your letter might even reach him. The cemetery isn’t going anywhere soon.
« It’s almost nice to think that somewhere someone lives metres from this and metres from that, and trusts that a letter will find him. »
Date of comment: 2009-04-21 11:22 •« Yes, except that when you are the visitor with directions to find, it’s pure hell. I mean I can see how that would work down in Puerto Viejo or Manzanillo on the Caribbean coast right next to the Panamanian border. There’s not much there and time flows at a different pace. You could even write your address according to bugs.
Date of comment: 2009-04-21 11:54 •100 meters north from the red poison arrow and 75 west from the hornet’s nest, right next to the stagnant water pond infected with all kinds of entrepreneurial lice and creepy microbes...
But in San Jose? »
« It’s the same thing in Mauritius, where they don’t even have postal codes. If places in the capital do have street numbers most places don’t. You have to trust the postman to know everyone in the vicinity, which, remarkably, is the case. These recent years, people have taken to giving names to their houses, usually pompous names like « Villa les Oiseaux » when the villa is in fact a shack
To get around, you usually have to rely on landmarks such as the the big mango tree on the left, next to the tamarind tree...usually, it allows only locals to get around, foreigners will need a taxi driver to figure out where they’re going 
»
Date of comment: 2009-04-21 13:03 •« You think the Postal Service is in bed with the National Association of Taxi Drivers?
»
Date of comment: 2009-04-21 16:31 •« Most probably ! Most of them are from the same family: small island style!
»
Date of comment: 2009-04-22 15:40 •By the way, I love the new design
« Do people really care about how we give our addresses? We may have no streets or avenues well - established but we do get to our destinations. We ticos, understand the addresses the way they are and I personally feel that it is PART of our culture to give addresses like that. Foreigns sometimes don’t get how we get to the places we are going with our instructions but that’s how we are =) »
Date of comment: 2009-08-12 18:55 •« Hola Sofia,
Date of comment: 2009-08-12 19:00 •I intended no criticism and agree completely that it is a cultural thing. Kudos to you for making it work. Pura vida! »