In Cochabamba, I haven't seen any street signs remotely "normal" by Canadian standards. Instead, there are signs posted on the sides of buildings and on walls and gates labelling the streets. For example, to the right.
Most streets don't actually have these signs, you have to look really closely at the address. In Canada, we have a number for our house, here there's the number with the street name underneath it. In case they want to change the name of the street halfway down, I guess.
Then, there's a significant portion of the city that doesn't have named streets. I have a map that has a lot of blank streets and I wondered if they were just too small for the mapmaker to put words on. No, the streets just don't have any names. You have to tell the taxi driver: "left here, right here, passed this street, etc."
Also, in Cochabamba they have an annoying habit of having like a million streets named the same thing, so you can't even say "Calle Antezana, por favor," because there are at least two. Here's a photo of the intersection of Pando and Pando.Cochabamba also has a really strange habit of naming streets after important dates. It's entirely possible to say "we're having dinner on the 25th of May" and mean a location. Or, even better, "I live on September the 10th between America and Beijing."
I'm pretty sure I've also seen only two different stop signs in the whole city. I realized this when, after being here for two weeks, I still didn't know the word for stop. So how do the drivers here deal with this? They honk some more.
So here's the breakdown, as far as I can tell, in terms of when people might honk:
- To see if you want a ride
- Because someone else is driving stupidly
- Because they're approaching an intersection and don't feel like slowing down
- Because they see a cute girl
2 comments:
Relative to Latin America, Canada has no history, and LatAm history is embodied in the street names. If that was the case in Canada, foreigners would wonder who "Main" is.
For instance, in Chile, there's isn't a town without a few streets named after Bernardo O'Higgins (a great LatAm name), who was the Chilean who routed the Spanish. Every country in LatAm features streets named after May 25 (Independance Day from Spanish rule).
So my advice to you is ask your host family who some of these people are that the streets are named after. You might run across:
* Tupac Yupangi, a 15th century Incan leader;
* Antonio Jose de Sucre, who defeated the Spanis on 2 April, 1825 (Santa Cruz has a April 2nd street);
* Simon Bolivar, Sucre's boss;
* Patino, Hochchild or Aramyo, three enterpreneurs who basically ran Bolivia's economy from 1900-1920;
* Victor Paz Estenssoro, a nationalist who heavily influenced Bolivian politics 1930 - 1956;
* Francisco Pizarro, the Spaniard who conquored Bolivia in 1538 (probably not much of him; LatAms celebrate the Spanish leaving, not arriving)
Not to put too delicate a point on it, but Cochabamba featured the first revolts against Spanish colonial rule in 1730, 137 years before Canada became a country. We ain't got no history.
In response, my spanish teacher lives on a street called Kapac Hyupanqui, probably the same guy. Yes there's at least one Sucre and one Bolivar street. There's a whole bunch of Patino stuff, but I haven't heard of the other guys
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