Filip Norrgård’s blog @ filips.net
Filip’s blog about mobile technology, tech itself and other stuff

Google Maps Goes Europe!
27 April 2006 in Fun & Root | Comments enabled

Google Maps was apperently updated just around two days ago with maps of Europe, which is absolutely fantastic!

Interestingly, the maps and photos of Vaasa / Vasa / Wasa was also updated with newer satellite photos, maybe in honour of the city’s 400 anniversary which is this year?
Anyways, the photos aren’t all that old, but still somewhat old, since the expansion of the “market square cave” aka. the parking space beneath the city center’s market square is quite viewable. If you look closely, you can see that they are at the completion stage and filling parts of the new underground parking space with sand for the market square pavement stones.

I think this picture dates back to two years to 2004, so that’s resonably new pictures Google got a hold of.

The interesting part here is that streets in Vaasa are bilingual, that is, named in both Finnish and Swedish. But, Google only identifies the streets on their Finnish name for the moment. If you zoom out, you’ll discover another interesting tidbit, all the islands in the Vaasa coastal area are in Swedish. (Ok, some of them have their bilingual names there, but the Swedish name is generally looking in the larger font size for some strange reason.) Interesting…