- I would think that some cities and their main streets were designed to go directly NSEW to make navigating the city easier not to make them align with the sun and moon.
- My thought on what is up and down would be that boats and ships needed to know which way they were going so they came up with the terms North, South, East and West. I would guess the ‘top’ of the planet being North is because why would those people have assumed they were at the bottom.
All my guesses though could be completely wrong.