International Ridiculousness

I almost forgot to blog about one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. I'm not talking about a three-eyed dog or old people playing basketball. I'm talking about the El Salvadoran airport. Not the airport itself, but something inside it.

For some reason, something like 75% of the shops in El Salvador's airport are perfume shops. I still can't fathom that. I mean, they only have 17 gates, but you've got something like two shops per gate, which means there were more than 25 perfume shops. And that, friends, is not an overstatement.

When we arrived at the airport, a couple friends and I embarked on a journey for chocolate and fast food. First we passed one perfume shop, then another right next to it. Odd as it was, we moved on. We passed a gift shop, and then another perfume shop after it. And another perfume shop on the other side of the hall. All this before we reached the next gate. We soon after discovered that the El Salvador airport boasts a whopping four restaurants (only one fast food, a Subway), four gift shops, and two book stores. The rest (like I said, about 25) were perfume shops, though I should note that some of the perfume shops also had alcohol.

Does El Salvador smell that bad? Do they just assume that people are so desperate to get out of their foul stench of a country that they'll jump at the nearest opportunity to bathe themselves in cologne? Or, perhaps even more bizarre, was the original perfume shop so totally overrun by tourists that they absolutely needed to open more shops mere feet away?

I don't know.