Mail is just one problem. Emergency crews, cabdrivers, utility workers and delivery people spend an inordinate amount of time on cellphones and knocking on doors to find out where they're supposed to be.
"It's total chaos," said San Jose-area retiree Claudio Gonzalez, 73, who recently spent three fruitless hours searching for a friend's home in an unfamiliar suburb. "I could find my way easier in a foreign country."
Postal authorities have embarked on a major overhaul. Recent changes in the way mail is sorted have cut the average delivery time to two days nationwide. Now the postal service is assigning numbers, street names and ZIP Codes to every home and building in the country, which at about 20,000 square miles is slightly smaller than San Bernardino County.
Officials have rolled out more than 430,000 streamlined addresses, mostly in urban areas. They hope to convert the entire country over the next two years if the government allocates about $1 million to finish the job.
Erecting street signs will take a lot longer and cost a bundle. Correos de Costa Rica is trying to persuade the private sector to help pay for that effort. But the biggest challenge will be altering the Tico mind-set, said Alvaro Coghi Gomez, the postmaster general.
"It's a cultural process," Coghi said. "We have to stop thinking about the fig tree."
Costa Rica isn't the only nation with an address system potentially befuddling to outsiders.
Neighboring Nicaragua uses the same landmark system, with a few added wrinkles. Residents often write arriba, or "up," to denote east (where the sun rises), and abajo, "down," for west (where it sets). Instead of meters, they use city blocks, or varas, an antiquated Spanish unit of measurement equivalent to about 33 inches.
Costa Rican carrier Montero has his hands full at home.
A third-generation postal worker, he joined the ranks because it was respectable work and he liked the benefits, which include company-paid pants, shirts and shoes.
He begins his day at 6:30 a.m. sorting mail at Correo Central, the grand if slightly scruffy downtown San Jose post office constructed in 1917. Workers handle the mail now much the way they did back then. Every one of the 28 million letters and packages mailed last year had to be sorted by hand. Modern equipment isn't capable of reading the addresses.
