Word: managua
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...released its smash-hit album The Joshua Tree, and Nicaraguans immediately recognized that one of the songs seemed to be written about their country. It wasn't, but 20 years later, most people here still hold as fact that Where the Streets Have No Name was written about Managua, a squat and sprawling capital city where, well, the streets are unnamed...
...Managua of today still has the feeling of a rural backwater that hopes one day to grow up to be a capital city. No building is taller than 10 stories. There are still more trees than buildings, and going "downtown" means going to the Metrocentro shopping mall...
...past landmarks, some of which were destroyed more than 30 years ago, in the 1972 earthquake. The quake and the civil war between the contras and the Sandinistas disrupted, among other things, plans to number the streets. And so giving directions here is still, as former New York Times Managua bureau chief Stephen Kinzer described it, a "Socratic" technique, based on first determining what the direction asker knows, then working backward from there...
...block "down," of course, is Managua code for "one block west." Sometimes going "down," then, actually means going uphill. To further confuse things, directions are given in a unit of measurement known as a vara, which is apparently based on the arm length of a former nobleman from some time and some place in the distant past...
...shoulders of the country's highways and byways. President Daniel Ortega, eager to lift his country out of poverty by attracting foreign investment, recently pledged to "launch an offensive" on unpaved roads. Until that war is won, however, the Bono song that most comes to mind in Managua is I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking...