Just kidding. But lately I’ve been using it to check out places in Peru. Some of the field school students wanted to know where their hostel is located. I scanned over the city of Lima until I found the right place. I guess you can’t tell much about crime and sanitation from the Google Earth view. They should make map overlays for crime and population density like SimCity has. Knowing Google, that’s coming.
I also looked around the country for archaeological sites. Most have been previously marked so it was pretty easy. You can see how huge some of the city-sites like Chan Chan are.
{View of Chan Chan from Google Earth. A small vertical bar to the left is a bus, for scale.}
If you want to see my Google Earth collection so far, download these tiny files and fire up Google Earth: Field School Sites, Peruvian Archaeological Sites
It’s not pronounced the same though: it’s chawn CHAWN, with stress on the second word. Also I just realized I titled a post about child sacrifice “Small Joys.”