Today I encountered a good smell
Today I encountered a good smell on the streets of Beijing. This is no common occurance -- the streets are filled with smells, of course, but most of them range from merely foreign to downright disgusting, with the exception of a few good food-related smells. There is, of course, the ubiquitous haze of pollution, a lung-burning, eye-tearing smell which gets stronger on the streets and even worse on the highways, supplemented by the smells arising from decaying piles of garbage, unwashed people, and strong gusts of odor from the sewers. The all-to-common piles of vomit one encounters daily on the streets indicate that it is not only foreigners who sometimes cannot tolerate the food here, although I don't know how these smell as I hold my breath and walk away from them wherever I see them. Sometimes it smells of urine, sometimes of raw meat or fish, sometimes of some strangely unpleasant food. Good smells, when they exist, are almost always the smell of things frying. But today, walking past a park near campus, I encountered an undeniably good, non-food-related smell. It smelled like flowers. Now, I didn't actually see any flowers -- what I did see was a bunch of leathery-skinned workmen in orange vests, digging near a big tarp just to the side of the sidewalk, a one-armed beggar playing the gao-hu, a traditional Cantonese instrument, a woman nursing her baby on the sidewalk, and a newspaper stand with about ten people clustered around it -- but I smelled them. And for the first time since coming to Beijing, I slowed down and took a deep lungful of air, to enjoy the beautiful smell. It smelled like the honeysuckle my sister and I saw when we walked to the beach to take in the Long Island Sound and beach on my last day in the States. The fragrant Chinese flowers, ironically enough, made me miss home.
posted by Kelly @ 12:14 下午
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