Travel should broaden the mind but more often dilates the nostrils, depending on the destination. You don’t have to possess the prominent nose of Cyrano de Bergerac to catch a whiff of the Guinness factory in Dublin, nor do you require a GPS to let you know that you have reached Faridabad, a sprawling industrial city north of New Delhi.
— From What’s That Smell? at WorldHum, with thanks to Nancy for the link!
There was a fire in the Guinness factory before Christmas. By god the hum!
Wow, that was quite a fire. For anyone else who wants to read about it:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9CNRT4O3.htm
This was a good article and I appreciate that you posted it. It’s interesting to think about how different places smell. I also think each house has itw own signature smell.
Mine certainly does!
Yes. Not only the scent of a place, but how that place smells during certain times of the year. A friend and I have had this discussion and really wish the pure clarity of winter could be bottled, and of course there’d have to be an intense version featuring a faint hint of wood smoke. Springtime is so gorgeous, too, even without the flowers. The damp earth and the way the air smells just before a storm is one of my absolute favorite smells. And yes, I’ve noticed certain cities or parts of cities have their own distinct smells.
One of my favorite smells too!
My mom travels and works in Viet Nam and whenever she comes back she has a “Viet Nam smell.” I think the smell is mostly the incense they burn there.
Whew, my first post after a big technology breakthrough for an old girl!
Yes, nothing like the smells of places, and I am seeing (smelling) them in the myriads of perfumes (thanks to wonderful sampling places I’ve discovered) I am now smelling; that gorgeous burnt coconut thing in Nicolai’s Cococabana and P. Generales’ Tuberose is exactly the smell of many places around the Pacific where they dry coconut over wood fires before its processed.
And the Guinness factory, didn’t hear about that Downunder (surprising as we are one of the great beer-drinking nations!)….
A smell that should be bottled…actually, it is now I come to think of it…is the aroma of caramel/molasses around the sugar mills in Queensland…it is so evocative and sumptuous, its rummy, has made me tragically lemming Spiriteuse Double Vanille, goodness knows how many more $$$ I’ll be spending to somehow get a bottle of THAT out here in the bush!
Hi and welcome! And hey, that sounds like a wonderful smell…it must make people eat more, I should think?
Thanks for the interesting link. Love the comments so far.
So much to say! Do you know that on the Sunshine Coast here in B.C., one of the funky little hippie shops sells essence of local Douglas Fir made into a room spray? A little in my living room and I’m in the middle of the rain forest in the middle of summer.
I will always remember the smell of the train stations in Italy. Walk in to any one of them, and you get hit with a blast of excellent dark-roast espresso. The tiny coffee shops in every station are jammed with people standing up around counters and tables, knocking back a quick triple with about a dozen teaspoons of sugar to fortify themselves for another leg of their journey.
When I visited my father in the Solomon Islands years ago in my early twenties, the people themselves had a different smell. They smelled wonderfully sweet and musky: according to one of the locals, from all the coconut oil they consume. He said we North Americans smell slightly sour, his theory being that it’s because of the dairy products we eat. For a couple of months after I got back, I refused to drink milk and eat butter and ice cream and ate a couple of Mounds bars a day. I don’t know if I smelled sweet and musky and un-sour, but that certainly was the goal. 😉
I love your stories! The Mounds bar experiment was quite clever. A scientific and aesthetic excuse to eat chocolate! 🙂
And the Doug fir room spray sounds super!
Hmmm. I’m willing to give a Mounds-only diet a try!
LOL. Seriously.
Another thing about Ireland I’ll always remember is the smell of peat fires burning, in the west of Ireland. The city of Tours, France used to smell like chocolate (that was the Poulain chocolate factory, I think). Chicago smelled like cornstarch (from the Argo factory), and Louisville used to smell like dog chow (from the Purina factory), when it didn’t smell like the stockyards. Cambridge, Massachusetts used to smell like Necco wafers, mint, or caramel. As long as it doesn’t kill you, the smell of a place is a part of that place!
Peat fire sounds like a wonderful smell.
While the city where I grew up is known for it’s smell, due to 5 paper/pulp factories (think rotting wood/eggs) I was lucky in the fact that there was a bread bakery just a block away from our house. The smell of fresh bread reminds me more of that city that the other smell that it’s known for.
On the other hand, people warned me about going to Venice in the summer. “It stinks” was the general consensus. I was either very lucky or had serious nasal congestion on all 3 visit, but I don’t remember any unpleasant odor.
Venice does stink when it’s hot, but I stopped noticing after a bit…so lovely to be there!
Another quick scent/place association: the smell of a boyfriend’s apartment combined with the scent I wore almost exclusively back then, circa 1990. Calyx plus garlic and tomato sauce and pepperoni from the pizza shop downstairs. Now THAT’S layering your scents.
🙂
That was the joy of Calyx though…it went with anything!