Visit Ixtapaluca (but please, don’t bother getting up)

All right, so of course I want you to actually really visit us in person.  But last month I made an amazing discovery – Google Street View has come to Ixtapaluca!

If you’ve never tried Street View, it works like this.  You can go on to a map, then you can actually go down to street level and see what you would see if you were driving down the street.  You can look around, up, down – all around.  You can go back the other way, forward – the ability to move yourself and look around really does make you almost feel like you’re there.

What you’re seeing are a collection of special photos taken by Google employees.  So they’re not right up to date, but it looks like the ones of Ixtapaluca right now were taken sometime this past summer.

So you can see the places we drive and walk every day, see the shops, the cars, the bicycle taxis – even people about their business.  You can even zoom in and get a closer look of things.  Amazing!

An image of Ixtapaluca from Street View.
I spy a bicycle taxi, combi taxis, election signs…
Now, every street isn’t on there – partly because there are so many closed communities (ie gated).  But still, there’s a lot you can see.

And surprisingly, you can – now, don’t tell anyone – but you can actually see our house.  Now I won’t tell you where it is here in public, but if you call or send me a note (and if I know you!) I might just spill the beans.

Meanwhile, go here to see Ixtapaluca.  Take the little orange-ish man on the left side, and drag him on to one of the main streets.  Give it a moment, and it will show with a blue outline all the streets with Street View.  Drop the man down in the place you want to start exploring.  More details on using Street View can be seen in the video below.

I’ll give you one clue – the street named Cuauhtémoc is what we drive down each day to take our kids to school.

I just tried it.  I found a mailman on a motorcycle – cool.  😉  Hey, there’s a store we shop at all the time!  Oops… looks like that guy is having car trouble.

Oh, sorry – I’ll let you go explore for yourself!  Use full screen – looks great.

Google video explaining Street View

More of a main street in Ixtapaluca