Junk Emporium

The buses in La Antigua are now doing what the restaurants have seemingly always done — cheekily charging passengers a premium for all the empty seats around them.

Covid-19 might have reset demand levels back a decade or so, but there has so far been no corresponding reset in supply. If anything, the pandemic has accelerated a pre-existing underlying trend, which has seen the city steadily transformed into an open-air emporium of overpriced junk — junk food, junk clothes, junk...

There has been a concomittant surge of visual clutter as well, an aesthetic degradation by stealth which one doesn't imagine is actually costing an arm and a leg in the traditional sense.

Those banners on the lamp-posts are no more, but the other day I found myself in the Parque Central wondering when that imitation airport terminal corridor will finally be cleared away from the front of the Capitanes General.