Hello fellow mappers,
I've had the pleasure to once again visit Prague during the last couple of days; hence I wasn't able to update the wiki main page, and I forgot to do so in advance unfortunately.
One thing I wanted to share with you though was the following two pictures. I stayed in a cheap hostel at the edge of the old town of Prague. To access it, you had to enter a very inconsiderable front door, which led to a rather run-down stair case. All floors but one were occupied by either the reception or dorms, but on the 3rd floor there was the portrayed door, with a small sign declaring this to be the embassy of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Czechia.
My point is, I often find that when we (and this very much includes me) map embassies (especially our own ones) we tend to go slightly overboard, most commonly even assigning a whole building or even building ground with large gardens. While such embassies exist, they are most commonly found only between major countries, or perhaps due to a colonial past etc. Any two medium sized countries (think below 50 mil) that are not even situated on the same continent will usually not have that much demand for diplomatic office space that it would require a whole building. Of course in the end many other factor play into this as well, aside from the wealth and desire for representation of the represented country the general city shape will play into it as well. In the real world, dense European old town centres will be much less inviting for free standing embassy buildings than new world planned capitals such as Washington D.C. or Brasilia, or cities with generally low property prices such as developing countries. But nevertheless, I think I might go back one day and readjust both some Kojolese embassies abroad (coordinating with the respective mappers) and foreign embassies in Pyingshum.
The stair case:
The front door; to be fair, there was a flag hanging outside of the window facing the street ;)
For the ones worried; I actually had a very pleasant stay at this hostel, despite what these pictures might evoke ;) Since I'm about to get my tonsils removed my break from mapping is likely to continue for a little while, but I hope this post might pose a bit inspirational to some of you ^-^ Cheers,
Leo