I just came back from a sabbatical. I spent one year gaining a day in my life, just like Phileas Fogg did, going around the world. He did it in 80 days though, and it took me 366 days to get from home to home.
One of the striking things with travels are the smells. Many years ago I noticed the smell of communism. This wasn't any virtual idea one could sense at communist party convents. It was a very concrete smell, which I felt in several Eastern European countries. You could smell it in both Moscow and Leningrad. It was at hostels in Hungary and restaurants in Poland. If you were at a railway station in Western Europe and you saw a train wagon that came from Eastern Europe, you could feel the smell as soon as you opened the door to get in. It wasn't any particularly unpleasant smell, even if it was far from eau de Cologne. It was as if the tourist boards of the socialist half of Europe tried to promote their countries with an odorous logo, that everyone would recognise, like the visual symbols of MacDonald's or Nike. However, I guess it simply was the smell of some mass produced cleaning liquid.
My trip around the world brought me to China, but that country was virtually free from this smell. It may not be entirely wrong to take that as a sign that China isn't really that communistic.
There is also the absence of smells. I didn't notice what I missed from Europe, until I got into a bakery in Taiwan, where they made bread with just the same smell as they do in France. I hadn't smelt that bread for more than half a year, and suddenly, the French boulangeries came back to my mind.
Another of the more pleasant smells of France is the smell of the maquis in Provence and Corsica. It is shared with many other Mediterranean countries of course, but it is nevertheless a marvellous reminder of that part of the world. Once when I smelt it for the first time after a long interval, I had the irrational thought "it smells just like that film I saw a few months ago". When I saw the film in a cinema in rainy Copenhagen (it was La belle Noiseuse), I had apparently managed to convince myself that I really smelt the maquis where the film was set.
There is a particular smell of botanic gardens, from Kyoto to Taipei, often a thick sweet smell, which probably comes from some plant botanic gardeners like growing. Cemeteries are more likely to smell of box tree, at least in Northern Europe. That may be why I prefer the German name of the plant: Buchsbaum.
There is also the universal, pleasant, but usually not particularly interesting smell of a newly mowed lawn. In the little mountain village of 足助, Asuke, in Japan, I smelt cut grass. I had never thought of it before, but that particular smell of cut grass, I had smelt in only one place before, and that was at my grandparents' house in Bäckseda in Småland. If there is a connection between Asuke and Bäckseda is difficult to say. It could be the way they cut the grass that drew forth some special plant sap. It could be a particular flower with a distinct smell.
Not all smells in Japan were pleasant. I usually don't mind tobacco smoke. I'm one of those persons, who loved smelling the tobacco of their father's pipe, when they were kids. However, I stayed at a very cheap hotel in Osaka, and the smoke of previous guests lingered in my room, so I could hardly breath. I left the window open for hours and threw out a big smelly (but visibly clean) ash tray, but the smell was there to stay. Some people would probably have given up and gone to another hotel, but I decided that if other people can survive it, then I can too. The cheaper your habits or the things you accept, the longer your money lasts, and the richer you are. In some peculiar way.
From Japan I went to the USA. The first odorous experience was in Hawaii. I went into a very small bookshop and suddenly realised that the smell was common but unique to that country. Only in USA bookshops have just that particular smell. It doesn't matter if it is a giant Borders or Barns and Noble in New York or a small little shop in Rockport, MA or in Hawaii. The smell is the same. In the not too distant future, electronic media may have replaced all books. I intensely hope that we anyhow keep the bookshops for the smell. They don't have to actually sell books. It will be enough if they let people in for an entrance fee to smell and touch the printed paper pages.
Las Vegas also has its own smell. Most casinos there seem to have the same smell, so when you get in, you know that you are in a casino and not anywhere, where you should look realistically at your chances for profit. It may be the smell of credulity or money or of cheap wall paper.
A journey is never simply a travel, if you listen to what your nose has to tell you.
5 September 2005
