You never really appreciate some things until they're gone. And I never really realized just how spectacularly well-done signs in Seoul are. Really. They're bloody amazing! You can find your way from anywhere to anywhere in Seoul with extreme ease. It's almost impossible to get lost there because there are always big, bright signs pointing you around to where you need to do, or at least towards a major landmark that will make navigation easy.
Now, there are a few times where I've gotten turned around for a bit in Seoul, but they always turned out to be relatively short detours.
Anyways, when I picked up the car the other day, I had to drive home with a map book at night, and that turned out to be a nightmare. Signs for major roads are only very close to the actual road, and there are few overhead signs to help you navigate. I probably spent between 45 minutes and an hour just driving around aimlessly trying to get my bearings. And I'm pretty damn good with maps and navigation. My major problem was that I couldn't look at the map much while driving, and had to navigate by street signs. Turns out that they aren't very visble, or rather they aren't located in easily visible locations, and they don't use highly reflective signs, so at night, they're effectively invisible.So I ended up missing roads and turns pretty regularly.
Well, I knew that in a new city I'd have a rough bout for a bit, but I didn't think it would be quite that bad. I figure another month or so and I'll have things down pretty well. Most of Melbourne seems to be laid out quite well, but the downtown sector seems to be a bit of a maze. That's where I ended up getting pretty lost the other night.
But, I got a GPS unit yesterday, so I won't have a repeat of that. I picked up a TomTom XXL 540, which seems like quite a nifty little device. It's got a large 5 inch screen, and seems fairly easy to use. Jury is still out for the moment though. I'm used to using ALMap, which is a Korean GPS and map program from ESTsoft (I used to work for them). It's actually really, really good. I have it on my HP iPAQ, and it's just wonderful. Easy to use, accurate, and easy to see things with, even on a smaller screen. If I had a choice, I'd want to have an ALMap GPS unit for Australia, but that's not an option. (The map data company that supplied the data for ALMap was purchased by another company, and they hiked the license fees up to unaffordable levels, so ALMap was basically shelved, although the ALMap SDK was still made available to developers needing to create mapping software in Korea.)
We'll see how the TomTom unit performs though. So far it seems pretty good. I decided to go with a dedicated unit instead of farting around with one on my HP or getting a smart phone like a Nokia. Dedicated units are generally far better at what they do. My wife's iPhone is pretty piss-poor for reliable GPS. It "works", but not very well. Certainly not up the level that the TomTom works at. I'm guessing that the Nokia GPS is about the same. They can only stick in so much equipment into that limited space, so it makes sense that you can get in a much higher quality GPS in a dedicated unit that doesn't need to fuss with phones and other distractions.
But back to signage... I was a bit surprised at how relatively poor signage here in Melbourne is. Even in Penang and Kuala Lumpur the signage is much easier to follow. I never had any problems driving around there, and never got turned around at all. It was always really simple and easy to get to places because the signs helped point you towards places. Downtown Georgetown isn't the friendliest place to navigate either. It's full of one-way streets and wonky turns and all sorts of weirdness. You might end up taking a wrong turn, but it's very easy to get back on course. There are barely any straight roads in Penang, too.
There is a sign that is wrong though. I forget exactly where, but there's it points you to Batu Feringhhi, but you end up going in the opposite direction. Once you know about that particular sign, you're fine though. The first time you take that wrong turn, it's a bit baffling trying to figure out why you're so far from Batu Feringhhi.
I suppose that it will take some getting used to the logic behind signage here in Merlbourne. For the moment though, I can't really see much at all.
Cheers,
Ryan