Excerpts from the Peanut Gallery

Smell: the Underrated Sense

And I don’t take smell lightly. You can live without one kidney, your appendix, your sight, your hearing (Wassat?? ENH?). We all know what it is to be blind and deaf, but no one ever lacks scent. This makes me think it may just be a little more vital to our survival than we originally thought. Apparently you can’t live without it.

So I, putting all my powers of speech to the test, hereby give you some of my favourite scents of Nicaragua:

First, people: I am living in a hot country, if you didn’t know. Shannon and I have, on several occasions, commented on an incredible phenomenon here. You are walking down the street and you pass someone who just bursts forth this smell that tickles your nose that makes you giddy with joy. It’s a woman who smells like flowers, or a guy who smells like he just jumped out of a Ralph Lauren ad and is about to sweep you off to a field of love. It’s a baffling thing in a country that makes you sweat and then laughs in your wet, flushed little face. I don’t know how they do it- especially the woman who is out Oprah-Winfrey style power-walking every morning and still smells like she has been dozing in Heidi’s alpine meadow. It MUST be something in the food.

There are some, ahem, interesting smells here too. There are places that I will forever associate with one smell or another: the fridge at work smells like crema that has gone just a little bit sour. I actually hold my breath now when opening all heretofore unknown fridges. The corner a block from my house smells like an outhouse. Carretera Masaya smells like smoke- someone, somewhere along that highway is ALWAYS burning something.

But I don’t want you to think it’s all bad; it’s definitely not. Like I said, there are people here that always smell good. Moreover, the Catholic Church across from my house early in the morning smells like something I love. It’s like it picks one of my favourite places to smell like each time I jog by- maybe as a reward for getting up to go jogging; or perhaps as a tempting little finger telling me to get myself to a church. One time I walked by and it was the forest at Qwanoes on Vancouver Island; another time it was the ocean.

And let’s not even get started on the flowers here! A couple weeks ago, two friends and I were in a restaurant that was absolutely empty save us and the two waiters, and each table had a sprig of giant peace lilies which smelled so good that I could not actually remove my nose from one of the blooms for a full three minutes. The waiter saw my addiction and kindly took pity on me, offering me a fresh sprig from an inside table to take home.

Ah yes, Scent: the underrated sense. You really can’t experience it unless you come here (oh and feel free). But these are the things I will leave you to ponder: If I start eating enough gallo pinto and drinking nothing but pinol and kola shaler, will I too smell like Heidi’s meadow?

posted by Kiki @ 1:36 p.m.