maps

If the world has been shrinking ever since the onset of the internet, perhaps Google Street View is primarily to blame. At least that’s what the good people at Mapcrunch want us to believe — just flip through instant Street Views of a host of countries from every continent (yes, even Antarctica) and revel in the festively painted desert houses of Mexico, the dreary vast farmland of Belgium that looks eerily like Quebec, or the deserted plains of South Africa you could be forgiven for thinking were Iowa.

But it’s not all endless roads and open land — there’s an indoor filter that lets you see inside the buildings in a host of countries, from a military museum in Thailand, to a classroom in Tokyo, to a German cheese and meat shop and organic Mexican bodega (international food shoppers eat your heart out). There is also an urban filter that weeds out the countrysides and suburbs and plunges you into the concrete layers that is Hong Kong and Seoul and the quaint isolated settlements that are, let’s be honest, as urban as places like Bermuda or Mongolia get.

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