Leaving Cordoba (4 of 5): Signs Signs Signs

Almost every day, I go to the bakery. It’s less than a block from our apartment and the elevator ride down from the sixth floor takes longer than the walk along the street. And most days, I go twice; first, at around 8:30 am – medialunas for breakfast – and then again at around four or five for a bag of criollas, the crusty square biscuits that make for a perfect merienda, the third of an Argentine’s four daily meals. The sign above the bakery has faded over the years, but the name – Panaderia Gizeh – is still legible. (The Egyptian motif is limited to the name and a framed piece of papyrus with hieroglyphics that hangs by the oven.)

For months I didn’t know the bakery even had a name; I was too busy shaking my head at the sign above the Evangelina hairdresser next door, which has a picture of Brad Pitt on it. The actor stares off into the distance, his eyes shaded by dark sunglasses, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

It’s the kind of sign that could only exist here. Like those of most of Córdoba’s businesses, the bakery and the hairdresser signs are printed on a waterproof fabric that is then stretched over a metal frame. I have to believe these are at least somewhat expensive, for two reasons: First, Bien Casero, a shop near our apartment that sells prepared foods to go, has two signs that hang on either side of their front gate that get taken in every night at the close of business. Secondly, the signs of most other small businesses here are sponsored advertisements for the products of much larger companies.

Tiny kiosks usually announce their presence with ads for either Beldent or Topline chewing gum. (Beldent is made by Cadbury; Topline comes from Grupo Arcor, which, with 27 factories across Argentina, claims to be the biggest candy company in the world.) Small restaurants and food shops mostly get topped off with Coke or Pepsi signs. The beer companies seem to have more or less complete control over the look of the bars here, and their names appear everywhere. (The most popular are Argentina’s Quilmes and Brazil’s Brahma, both of which are owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev.) Folding chairs, umbrellas, ashtrays – every conceivable surface is plastered with the name and color of a particular brew, to the point that the names of the bars themselves seem secondary, if not completely unknown.

Which isn’t to say that the names aren’t occasionally clever. Near Córdoba’s central courthouse, for instance, right next door to the Justice Cyber internet café, is the El Veredicto kiosk. Across the street, El Codigo restaurant serves lunch to the lawyers. But more often than not, the corporations take priority, and nowhere is this clearer than at the unbroken string of seven bars along the canal in the city center. The sign of each bar advertises a different alcoholic drink (Fernet 1882, Warsteiner, Cordoba Cerveza, Jim Beam, Budweiser, Brahma, Quilmes, Heineken), and hardly anyone refers to a single watering hole by name. “Let’s meet at la cañada,” they say.

One of the seven – Morrison Bar – manages to upstage the name of its patron company (Brahma) by plastering its façade with a huge portrait of its namesake, Jim Morrison. Which brings us back to Brad Pitt, and to this country’s rampant disregard for intellectual property rights. The Coffee and Tea Cafe, an upscale café that serves Cabrales-brand coffee at its two Córdoba franchises, has not only adapted the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf logo to make it their own; they’ve also incorporated a Starbucks mermaid into the shop’s décor.

Pizza stores seem to be particularly enthusiastic “borrowers,” and Córdoba has a MoMA Pizza (as in the modern art museum in New York), a Cerebro Pizza (as in the brainier half of that animated duo, “Pinky y el Cerebro”), and Charley’s Pizza (as in Chaplin).

But when it comes to decorating the signs of otherwise unremarkable businesses, nothing can compete with the United States’ most famous animated family. The Simpsons are huge here – this despite the fact that Rebekah assures me that much is lost in the translation – and images of Homero and the clan are used to sell everything from cell phone plans to locksmith services.

Hamburguesas Krosty in Nueva Córdoba is a genius bit of marketing, although I wouldn’t eat there if you paid me – making the shop even more like its animated counterpart than its owners might have intended.

It’s important to know, though, that these are the exceptions to the Argentine urban landscape’s general repetitiveness. On every block of every neighborhood in every city, the businesses start to look almost identical, and the things they sell are even more similar still. I state this with confidence, because I spent part of last month writing a guidebook chapter about the province of Córdoba, and finding restaurants that didn’t look or taste like all the others was not that easy.

For better and for worse, every barrio has just about everything it needs within a few blocks – a bakery, a fruit & vegetable shop, a butcher, a kiosk, a newsstand, maybe a restaurant or two – with the result being that people stay in their neighborhoods, just like I’ve been staying in mine. Nobody travels across town to get a pizza from the place with the pretty sign, or the clever name. There’s little reason to: the Pizza Napolitana (tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, roasted red peppers, green olives) is just the same.

It’s the people who own, work at, and support these businesses who make each one unique, and this is probably the aim behind what would appear to be a very unusual guerrilla ad campaign. Large, handwritten signs have been popping up around Córdoba recently, and they look like messages from one person to another.

“Fernando: I am waiting for you at McDonald’s so that we can make a toast with Coke.”

This is how the world’s most popular restaurant is promoting itself here in Córdoba? Another:

“Ana: I’m sorry for standing you up when we were supposed to meet at McDonald’s. I hope you forgive me.”

Very uncool, dude. But now that you mention it, I could go for a Big Mac…

Leaving Córdoba (3 of 5): Hombre de Casa

Let’s go back to the mall for a second. It has all the standard stuff that you’d expect to find in a North American mall – a food court, a department store, lots of mid-aisle kiosks selling crappy jewelry – but there are a few surprises too. You can buy medical insurance. You can book a trip at the travel agency. You could even lease a car: In four small corners on the ground floor are four smaller cars – a Chevy, a Peugeot, a Citroën, and a Fiat – and each is accompanied by a man in a suit sitting at a desk, waiting to answer your questions.

The home exercise machines and fine leather products notwithstanding, the most luxurious item at the mall is the mall itself. The charms that have already worn off of similar malls in the U.S. still draw many people to spend parts of their weekends here. With wide stretches of polished stone floors and no sputtering cars to avoid, the mall is the perfect environment for parents, children, and baby carriages. Yet strollers are a rarity in this land of narrow and cracked sidewalks, so the mall has a fleet of loaners, and each is emblazoned with the Nuevocentro Shopping logo.

A word about “shopping”: What was a gerund in English turns into a noun en castellano. Shopping is not an activity; it is a place. The word, as far as I can tell, is always preceded by an article, and is used in sentences like:

• Vivimos en la esquina de Duarte Quiros y Rio Negro, al frente del shopping. (We live at the corner of Duarte Quiros and Rio Negro, right across from the shopping.)

• No, no vendo cospeles. Vas al shopping. (No, I don’t sell bus tokens here. Go to the shopping.)
  

Strange syntax aside, the mall is effectively just another Córdoba commercial street. Never mind the Lacoste, Timberland, and Puma shops. Never mind the Garbarino electronics store with its wall of flat screens playing nothing but futbol and Foo Fighters music videos. And don’t be fooled into thinking that only in the magical world of the mall do cafe waiters run around to the different shops with silver trays of coffee. No, this morning ritual takes place all over Argentina, the only difference being that on the streets outside, the trays are mostly plastic and are usually covered to prevent dust from settling atop the cafe con leche.

Nuevocentro Shopping is also home to shops that play essential roles for the barrio. These less glamorous, quotidian businesses are clustered around the mall's western end, the one furthest away from the Sheraton (and closest to our front door). There’s a newsagent, a supermarket, a shoe repair shop, an ice cream stand; I once bought a plumber’s snake to unclog our shower drain at the hardware store. And the shop on this row that we patronize most regularly is – perhaps not surprisingly – the laundry.

Every day, from 10am to 10pm, they’re there, the team of white-uniformed laundresses, always in plain view, always washing, drying, folding, pressing, and steaming, and always ready to drop whatever it is to receive our weekly two-baskets-worth of dirty clothes. The kids hanging out at the bottom of the cinema steps don’t concern them; they smile at me as we count out piles of remeras, pantalones, y ropa interior.

Having someone do your laundry anywhere is a privilege, but here, even though it’s cheap by U.S. standards (about four bucks a load), it's a genuine luxury, and I am pretty sure that we’re their best customers. It’s gotten to the point that they no longer ask me my name (they just write “JONAS” on the little green ticket) or for my phone number (which I still have not memorized). They’ve stopped raising their eyebrows at the number of t-shirts I bring them, even if I’m still a bit embarrassed by the gargantuan size of the plastic bags in which our clothes are returned – cleaned, folded, and smelling strongly of chemicals.

Recently Andrea – she’s the one who pulls her hair back with a thick headband that makes her baby face look even rounder – remarked to one of her co-workers at the lavanderia how funny it was that I was the one who they saw all the time. “Hombre de casa,” I heard her say, laughing. The words translate to “man of the house,” but it seemed clear enough that what she meant by them was quite the opposite sentiment. My command of this language may not be great – I later found out that what she probably said was “amo de casa” – but my read of the speaker was dead-on: that phrase literally means "a male housewife."

To these women playing their gender-appropriate roles, I am a source of amusement – the guy who takes care of his and his girlfriend’s laundry. But even if it doesn't make sense, I'd rather think of myself as the hombre de casa, the man who is of the house – this means cooking, cleaning, and laundry, sure – but both inside and also around it. Being of a house, after all, is way more fun when that house is in a neighborhood like this one, even if the laundresses occasionally laugh at you. Everything I've been writing about our life here in Barrio Alberdi derives from the simple fact that I genuinely enjoy the errands I run around here. I go happily from shop to shop, talking to the owners, understanding less than half of what they say back to me, smiling at them awkwardly and feeling thankful that there's a script for what my response should be most of the time.

I carry my purchases in a reusable nylon shopping bag – I call it my “abuela bag” – and it’s coming back with us to Los Angeles, flexible plastic handles and all. Made of tight-knit nylon, its light-blue and white stripes are reminiscent enough of the Argentine flag to remind me where it came from. Here's hoping I can bring a bit of this barrio to wherever it is that we live next.