Those darned road signs

Finding your way round the city should not be a problem: there's a map and there are signs. On the surface the situation looks good. In reality, it isn't.

The best (and only?) street map of Cape Town has led us astray on many occasions. The map and reality don't always meet. The map may not have road names written on it, and the roads might end even though the map tells you you can drive through. The street names are also sometimes not quite the same on the map and the street signs. The spelling may be different and whoever wrote them down didn't pay much attention to whether the name should have a 'road', 'street', 'avenue', 'close', 'boulevard' etc. in it.

Road signs are not always helpful, either. You may be following road signs to the airport, for example. You follow and follow and come to a T-junction. You then need to guess which way to go as there are no more signs. Or you may be driving to the hospital. There's a sign pointing to a certain direction. You drive on the road, miles too far, as there are no signs to tell you you were supposed to turn at some point.

It's also difficult to follow the map as you can't always know where you are as not all street corners have signs for street names. You need to figure out by looking at the surrounding streets.

India was invited to a birthday party after school today. I found the street (Avenue Alexandra) on the map and found our way there easily. We couldn't find the house, though. We were looking for number 23. We found 21, 19 and 25 - in that order, but no 23. We couldn't see any familiar cars, either.

I looked at the map again. And - goddamit - this was not the only Alexandra in Cape Town. It seemed as there were Alexandras scattered all over the place. We found the correct one and arrived at the party just as the children were about to sing "happy birthday".