The kind-of-icky smell of clean

I have an old guideline for traveling -- the two things you absolutely must do when visiting a new country is ride the public bus and visit a local grocery store. I figure, this is where you see how the people in a place really live.

Naturally, when I first came to Buenos Aires several years ago, I went to the local grocery store here (a "chino", an independently-owned small grocery, generally owned by asians). It's not too big, and there really doesn't seem to be all that much food for sale. Lots of wine, soda, beer. And LOTS of cleaning products. So many cleaning products you can hardly believe it. I don't even know what half of them are -- I don't spend too much time browsing. But it's really disproportional, and you see it in every grocery store, big and small.

I was reminded of this a couple days ago when the cleaning lady at my tourist rental apartment put on clean sheets. I got into bed, ready for that nice clean-sheet feeling, and, gross, it smelled like i stuck my head in a giant bag of really cheap detergent. And this is just the smell left on sheets that had been through the laundry.

And I thought, ewww, this is the smell of chemical-clean, not clean-clothes-clean. And all those cleaning products, I'll bet most of them leave that old-fashioned chemical-clean smell behind.

I have noticed also that they advertise air freshener an awful lot during daytime TV. That seems a little old-fashioned, like something from the sixties or seventies. But what do I know, maybe they still advertise that stuff on daytime TV in the states.

I can't generalize that much here. Maybe people feel that this is a dirty city, and need to compensate. Maybe they're just a generation behind in cleaning technology, still using the chemical-warfare approach that my mother used in the sixties and seventies. Maybe it's nothing, just something I noticed.

But I do know that the smell of my pillowcases and sheets from this laundry is just icky. It's the weirdest thing.

Important Weird-Laundry-Smell Update! (OK, pretty much the opposite of important, really) Two days ago I was riding a hot subway train wearing a t-shirt that had been laundered at least a week before. I grab the bottom of the shirt at flutter it forward and back to create a little breeze up the front of the torso (something us hot-and-sweaty-mens do to try to evaporate the pooling sweat). And this breeze came with a pretty significant smell of the nasty laundry detergent, significant enough that I'm sure others smelled it, significant enough that it lingered in the air for about ten seconds. This is a nasty, hot, crowded subway car, which no doubt had many significant smells of its own. But my nasty laundry smell won out, at least for a few seconds. And this after a week of sitting in the closet. Nasty!