Coca-Cola Tiles

This is another part of the same wall that I showed yesterday.  The old advertisement for Coca Cola is missing a few tiles.

This gives me an opportunity to share another oddity about Costa Rica not using street addresses, but instead people giving directions based on the direction and distance to a landmark that others will know.

So many people gave directions from the location of the Coca-Cola bottling   plant in San Jose that maps of the city
even print the location "Coca-Cola." To make this practice even more odd, the Coca-Cola bottling plant relocated years ago, but everyone still refers to that part of the city, a busy bus transit area, as "Coca-Cola."

This week we are showing photos from our recent trip to the Galapagos Islands on our Viva la Voyage travel photo site.

Old Grocery Store SIgnage

As I walked a little farther from the Marriott Hotel through a suburb of San Jose, I cam across a wall with faded paint advertising a food market, with the universally recognized bottle shape and trademark of Coca-Cola.

Tomorrow I will tell the story of why maps of San Jose identify a section of the city as "Coca-Cola."

This week we are showing photos from our recent trip to the Galapagos Islands on our Viva la Voyage travel photo site.

Surf lessons on Tamarindo Beach

Tamarindo is a popular place for people to learn to surf. This is a photo of the beach in front of the Tamarindo Diria Resort, where one of our two condos is located. There are surf shops offering lessons on the beach front road and surf lesson advertised right on the beach.

If you are going to advertise surf lessons, what better signage than to plant a sign shaped like s surfboard and plant it in the sand?

We have photos of the red rock formations of Sedona, Arizona, this week on our Viva la Voyage travel photo site.

Diria gate

As a follow up to the series of recent photos I have posted showing some signs around town, here is a photo of the central portion of a gate on the grounds of the Tamarindo Diria Resort.  The logo of the hotel, which is a pre-Columbian figure, is incorporated into the center of the gate.

As is evident from my commentary yesterday in which I mentioned the decline of the Native American population in Spanish colonial times, the remnants of pre-Columbian culture in Costa Rica is not great because of the huge decline of the Native American population under Spanish rule.  

In addition, the Mayan Civilization that left stone temples and artifacts in other areas of Central America did not extend as far south as Costa Rica, although some remnants of its influences have been found.  In my opinion, the Tamarindo Diria's logo seems to reflect a Mayan-influenced theme.

German Bakery

Yesterday I showed a sign for the Paris Bakery.  What do you do if you want to compete with the Paris Bakery?  Well, I guess you would sell baked goods from the German Bakery.  

This is a photo of a delivery truck outside one of the convenience markets in Tamarindo bringing baked goods from a German Bakery, which is evidently located at the Liberia Airport, which is an hour away.   

I was reading a book about Costa Rican history recently and learned a little about baked goods in colonial Costa Rica.  In the early 1800's, bread was a luxury eaten only by the elite.  Corn was the grain used by most people, as it had many advantages over wheat.  Its yield was 10 times per acre, and it could be ground into meal at home, rather than taken to a mill to be ground into flour.  Corn could also be grown and harvested with a lot less labor than wheat, which was critical because of the shortage of labor.  In just 52 years from 1569 to 1611, the number of Native Americans in Costa Rica declined from 120,000 to 10,000.

 

The discussion about German pastries above reminds me of a bit of trivia that I learned during a visit to Copenhagen.  What Americans refer to as "Danishes" are in Denmark referred to as "Vienna pastries."  The breakfast treats were popularized in Denmark when they had a strike and they brought in bakers from Vienna.  I don't know if that is true or not, as maybe the tour guides just like to fool American visitors to see what we will believe.  After all, we were gullible enough to take pictures of that little mermaid statue, which in my opinion has to be the biggest over-hyped sight in Scandinavia, and maybe the world, but I digress.

I want to acknowledge and thank those readers of this blog who have left comments during the past week or two, and apologize for not being able to respond to them, because I was traveling in Morocco until now.   

Paris Bakery Pizza

Tamarindo may not be large enough to have even one traffic light, but we have two Paris Bakeries.  So what does this Paris Bakery advertise with their sign out front?  Pizza, of course.  

What could be more French than to sit in tropical Costa Rica, gazing at the palm trees swaying in the ocean breezes, and eating pizza. 

Surfboard sign

Today we return to my little series of photos of signs around town.  If you are in the business of renting surfboards and providing surfing lessons, what better way to advertise than to use a surfboard for a sign.   This is similar to the giant donut on top of the Randy's Donut shop near Los Angeles International Airport, for those people familiar with that commercial landmark. 

Tomorrow, I will show you what can be done with used surf boards.

Turtle sign

Here is a sign north of town that warns people not to drive their quads over the beaches were turtles lay their eggs.  I like the dialogue by the baby turtle, who appeals to the conscience of the rider by pleading, "Dude, Please don't kill me."  I guess the authorities that placed the sign thought that if the quad drivers might not respect the authority of the sign, maybe they would obey the plea of a baby turtle who calls them a "dude."

The beaches near Tamarindo are important nesting sites for sea turtles.  Playa Grande, which occupies the north half of Tamarindo Bay, is within Las Baulas National Marine Park and is protected as the nesting site for the endangered leatherback turtles.

Nachos sign

Today we go to the other extreme in advertising.  Instead of a classy billboard with attractive people in sophisticated clothes like the last couple of days, this local restaurant advertises the size of its nachos by comparing them to the size of the customer's  buttocal area.  

Since I am an American, I can make the following observation without the risk of insulting my fellow countryman:  the restaurant had American tourists in mind when they created this appeal.  How do I know?  The sign is in English in a Spanish speaking country, of course.

A friend of mine who who stayed in our condo last year got such a kick out of this sign that he mentioned it in an email.  I guess the sign accomplished its purpose, as it attracts attention and causes the restaurant to be noticed and remembered, as least for the size of its nachos. 

Bus billboard

Yesterday I showed a billboard with a photo of this model to advertise a housing development.  Here is another use of the same advertisement, except the ad is on the back of the shuttle bus that runs between the Garden Plaza shopping center and hotels and resorts in Tamarindo.  

I can imagine the dialogue between the model and her agent.  It probably went something like this:  "Hey, buttercup, I got a great gig for ya.  You wear an elegant, sparkly evening gown with spaghetti straps."

She might inquire:  "Swifty, where will my photo be displayed?  I want to make sure that it fits my image for sophisticated modeling jobs."

The agent would respond, "It'll be first class all the way, baby.  Your photo will be on billboards and magazine ads.  And there will be a giant photo of you plastered all over the back of a bus, with taillights coming out of your neck like giant moles.  It'll be great." 

Here is a photo of what the rest of the bus looks like.  It is a shuttle bus that takes people back and forth from hotels and resorts in Tamarindo to the Garden Plaza Shopping Center, which is at the entrance to town and, unlike most of the shops in Tamarindo, is not in walking distance from the center of town.

Tomorrow, I will show you method of promoting a business that definitely was not created by an ad agency.

Tamarindo Airport, Madison Avenue Style

I have shown some photos of the Tamarindo Airport recently. Here is a billboard promoting the airport. You will see that Madison Avenue has nothing on Costa Rica for creating advertisements that project an attractive and sophisticated image for a location.

The typical traveller arriving at the Tamarindo airport is a tourist in shorts and a tee shirt. The Tamarindo Diria Resort, which owns the airport land and adjacent golf driving range where this billboard is located, evidently did not want to show typical tourists in their billboard promoting the airport.  Instead, they showed a smartly dressed businesswoman and businessman, and two guys who look like body guards.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone in Tamarindo wearing a business suit. If anyone in Tamarindo did wear a suit, it would certainly not be a dark suit like you see in this advertisement. If I were ever to see a suit in Tamarindo, I would expect it to be a seer sucker or light khaki summer suit. It would be the type of suit that you would see in an old James Bond movie being worn by a sweating older guy in a tropical locale who briefs James Bond on what the bad guys have been up to in that location, about a day or so before the guy gets killed.

Sorry to inflict you with my stream of consciousness planning for these posts. We have gone from the airport in Tortuguero, to the airport in Tamarindo, to the billboard for the airport in Tamarindo, and I think tomorrow I will develop the billboard advertisement theme a little more.