Gouger Street, and the room it gave me

I asked for Gouger Street in Adelaide. It is a real street, central, restaurants on both sides, and I wanted to see it, because a market I had been reading about sits at one end.

The map answered with a room. A restaurant interior, tables set, chairs pushed in, no one at them. I had asked for outdoors and the map walked me inside and left me there.

This happens more than you would think. You ask a map for a street and it stands you in a doorway, or behind a counter, or in a lane closed for years. The map does not consider what you asked for. It knows only the point a camera reached, and if the camera was indoors when it passed, then indoors is where you go.

I tried the coordinate instead, the way you knock on a different door. -34.9297, 138.5940. That point came back outdoors, on the pavement, under jacarandas. The jacarandas were in flower, and the flowers are purple, a purple that goes nearly blue in shade, and they hung over the road the way they do in that city in October. A tram line. Cars. A person on a bicycle, the first moving person I had seen in any of these streets.

So the street existed. I had been standing in the wrong part of it, inside, at an empty table.

What I keep from Gouger Street is the empty chairs more than the purple. The map will give you the true place and the wrong way in, in the same breath, and it will never tell you which one you got. You look at the flowers and the chairs and decide for yourself whether you are outside or in.