The Smells of Travel: Good, Bad, Memorable!

As we’ve mentioned, in Rome we live in a neighbourhood that is predominantly Chinese; there’s a Chinese restaurant on the corner that we pass every single day. It smells amazing (we love Chinese food)! And smelling that smell got us thinking about the smells we associate with particular places we’ve been. Sometimes they are unpleasant, sometimes they are pleasant.

As you may know, smell is the most powerful sense, even in humans, and it doesn’t take Marcel Proust to teach you that a smell or taste can evoke memories long-forgotten. Scientists suggest that many of our personal preferences derive ultimately from smells we aren’t even aware of. For instance, you might dislike somebody upon a first meeting because they wear the same cologne as someone else you dislike. And – because brains do these things – you will certainly come up with a ‘good reason’ for this – he just looks shifty, or she seems mean. Here are a few of the smells that immediately take us back to particular places. Some of them sound very unpleasant, but that isn’t necessarily so; we’ve come to see them as simply evocative.

Chili + Flowers + Cow Dung + Sweat

We spent about a month in South India. And we didn’t spend all of it riding on buses. We also walked around a lot, and the smell that epitomizes India for us is aging cow patties, left in the middle of the street to harden, plus the heady bouquet of overripe flowers, often in giant piles at various shrines, plus a mix of Indian spices that will be familiar to you from curry: cumin, chili, turmeric, fenugreek, cardamom. Combined with human sweat, because the heat is often brutal there. We haven’t smelled this combination anywhere else, and we can’t imagine we ever could. But if and when we smell it again, we’ll immediately be transported back to South India.

Trash

When we lived in Mindelo, one of the main roads we took along the water was past a giant waste treatment plant. Cape Verde takes its trash very seriously, and their efforts are impressive. There is a lot of recycling, using oil barrel lids and fishing nets for new purposes. One of our favourite pieces of art in that flat came from recycled materials. Wind currents mean that a lot of marine waste washes up on their beaches, and Cape Verdeans are struggling to figure out what to do with it. So saying that we think of trash when we think of Mindelo isn’t meant to be disrespectful. We applaud their efforts, and we have many other memories of the place. Still. The particular combination of sea air and garbage is a smell we’ll always associate with Mindelo.

Marijuana

In Limassol, we had a next door neighbour who was always smoking pot. We smell that smell elsewhere, naturally. But this smell featured so regularly inour Cypriot life – we opened the corridor windows several times a day, to try to dispel the smell – that now it always makes us think of our apartment with the beach view.

Honey and Pistachios

In Istanbul we lived around the corner from a pastry shop. This is never a bad thing, and they seemed to be baking fresh baklava all day long. So the particular smell of baklava takes us immediately back to our Aksaray, our immigrant Istanbul neighborhood.

Cherry Tea

Here in Rome, we bought half a pound of cherry tea in our first week. We drink it every few days or so, and we suspect that it’ll continue to remind us of our little red flat near the train station.

There’s a Whole World Out There to Smell!

We’re not quite sure what to do with this newly-gained insight. It even extends to our toiletries: we often choose from unfamiliar options when we need to buy soap or shampoo. Cinnamon soap will always remind us of one of our destinations, as chamomile and mint shampoo will of another.

We’ve thought about requesting of AirBnb that from now on they provide a smell profile of the different flats we’re considering. Barring that, we’re planning to do what we can to take control of the smells of our life, and to ensure that they are positive. Perhaps we’ll buy fragrant flowers more often, or invest in an unfamiliar herb to spice up our lives. Tell us – is it just us, or do smells influence your memories of a place too?