I always seem to remember all the smells of a city long after my travel experience has ended and it can easily evoke very strong memories in my mind’s eye and all of a sudden delight once again. I don’t know if other fellow travellers have experienced the same as me and people look at me with curiosity when I tell them that each city I have visited has a particular and unique smell to it and one blind man I once met on my travels couldn’t have agreed more!
Do I maybe possess a heightened sense of smell like the blind and wise gentleman or maybe the answer is already hard wired in our brains and, as neuroscientists have now confirmed, ‘odour memory seems to be the most resistant to forgetting’. The smell and also the taste of any new place are the first to hit me and seem to linger on and endure, and can easily conjure up all kind of scenarios, vistas and experiences that I thought were long forgotten.
How could I forget the heady and sensuous smell of the spice souk in Najran and Turkey, pervading the air, your clothes and your skin or the summery smell of sweet scented jasmine in a gentle breeze in the med? My list could go on forever and you can tell a lot about the character and atmosphere of a city by its smells, not just from what you can see. Rudyard Kipling summed it up quite simply by saying ‘the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it!’ and there is certainly a lot of truth in that.
What's your experience of this?
