How do you paint or photograph a smell - map of my route to work...

On the way to work yesterday we mapped one street we use by its smells:

At 9am the bakery is blowing hot freshly baking bread smells out the vent from its kitchens.  Humans seem to like that smell.  It is the sort of smell that tells me things are happening in the kitchen and there might be some bits that fall onto the floor for a cat.  It is not however suggestive of roast chicken but I live in hope whenever I see the light on in the HOT BOX.

Beside the bakery is a Steki (cafe, ouzo, food) where locals hang out and wave at me passing in the evenings.  The girl putting the chairs outdoors in the mornings always greets me, and the heavy smell of incense wafts out of the bar.

Round the corner past the shop with eggs and cleaning products (does anyone else think that is a slightly strange combo?) there is a tyre fitters.  There is the unmistakable stink of new tyres.  It doesn't surprise you does it that cats and dogs feel a deep need to 'freshen the air' around that smell wherever we encounter it - most notably of course tyres of parked cars.

Across the road is a fruit shop.  Today it smells of water melons piled up by the door.

Past the derelict building that smells of old building, of dust, damp, mold.... and on to where the same two old boys are sitting every morning chain smoking at a small table outside a funeral directors office.  In the queue perhaps?

At the end of that block is the butchers.   F can't smell that so well but it makes my nostrils flare as we pass.  Diagonally opposite is a shop dedicated to cheese.  There is something slightly fascinating and simultaneously repulsive about the smell of fermented milk curd, and being on the side of the street that we use on the way home it is the one that gets F's nostrils flaring.

From here the density of cafes increases with the smell of fresh warm pastry, hot pites (pies), and the wafts of coffee.  Our progress is interrupted by the cafe owner who dashes out every morning to greet me.  Yesterday he kissed me - yuck!

Outside a cafe further down the hill 4 old guys in a cloud of eye-watering cologne are clustered about a table nursing their expresso coffees.  A bus goes by and belches out a cloud of Diesel exhaust fumes.  Across that intersection is a fish shop.  We hurry on by; neither F nor I like fish.  Hardware shops and electrical appliances  don't contribute a lot of particular interest to the smell map, but the next block has got a hairdressers and beauty parlor.  You can smell those when the door opens and a freshly dressed coiffure struts out; and there is that underlying whiff of nail polish chemicals.

Just beyond there we were assaulted yesterday by the scent of jasmine but couldn't identify the source; a balcony above the street maybe?

We cross the BIG street at the bank.  Banks might have a distinctive smell but they keep it closely guarded; locked in.  From that point on it is really more of the same: bakeries, cafes, another tyre place, pharmacies, a service station forecourt, a few residential doorways that are too close to nightclub exits, and traffic fumes.

And we finally arrive at work where the foyer smells of whatever they use to polish the marble.  Sitting in the office with the doors open to the balcony we are occasionally assailed by the smell of marine fuel combustion as a ferry makes it way out of the port, and at lunch time the smell of cooking fish from the restaurant downstairs.

It is quite a map and F wonders whether I could find my way home using just that.  Of course I could - and those are just the smells she can smell; I have so, so, so many more plotted out in my mind map of our neighbourhood.