You don't need to know the map at all to know East/West.
Your minimap is always oriented with North at top so you should be able to know which way to go without having to move to check first. Yes, from mid it's only 2-3 seconds to get somewhere where you can see one side or the other, but it's only maybe .5 seconds to look at your minimap because you can do it from where you are.
Also, I didn't even know "Grass/Snow" until after I hit 50 because nobody uses it on my server. People concentrating on a task tend to automatically filter out extraneous details such as the scenery if it isn't relative to the task at hand. See, for example,
famous selective intelligence test.