My, what big anuncios you have!

One of the reasons I am here, and many of the expats are here, is to just get away from what seems like the out-of-control commercialism of life in the states these days. Everyone just wants more and more and more stuff, fancier and fancier stuff. Things like fifty thousand dollar kitchen make-overs, they might not be signs of the apocalypse, but they do seem like signs of a life out of balance.

But the joke's on me -- Buenos Aires is hardly the best place to get away from all this. Turns out they're crazy for "el shopping". There are a bunch of fancy shopping malls here, and people seem actually proud of them. They will ask you if you've been to this or that mall

Where you really notice this is the number and size of outdoor advertisements, or anuncios. They're all over the place, and they are not subtle:

But I guess this kind of visual clutter is part of living in a giant metropolis. Lord knows there's lots of giant ads in New York or Tokyo. But in New York they try to keep the separate at least, so you're only looking at one ad at a time. Here they show up in groups, which seems to add to the chaos. Whether it makes the ads themselves more or less effective, well, I'll leave that question to the marketers.

But the reason I bring all this up, really, is to show the following ad, which may be the biggest ad of any sort that I've ever seen. And since it's little more than a gigantic picture of the beautiful (and fierce) Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova, I'm all in favor. If we have to clutter the visual landscape with ads, this seems to me the way to do it:

Click on the picture to see a full-sized version of this foto, if you really want to get a feel for its size.