THIS PLACE SMELLS!

Everyone seems to be bellyaching about the humidity. These San Franciscans, they are uncomfortable when the air is moist. Warm and moist.
And yet they claim that the air here is more humid than many other places.


They're not fully in tune with reality. This place is normally dry as a mummy. California is a desert. Even San Francisco.

The Netherlands is quite otherwise. So is South East Asia. Things smell different there.

For the past three days I have been remembering odours.


Landing at Manila Airport (wet and rotten), the room where I slept in the house in Makati (faint hint of incense - Auntie H. burned sandalwood there everyday to mask the horrid pong of white person) and also the hallway from the dining room to the back of the house (camphor, green soap, and mildew).
The kitchen too, of course - it smelled very Chinesey.

The intersection in Binondo where we wrecked the jeep (machine oil, fear, and something very rotten), Ongpin Street (El Presidente Restaurant - clams in blackbean sauce, eels braised in rice wine, kangkong with bago'ong and garlic), the bakery along the estero near Benavidez (spilled tea, hot butter, and something fishy).
Isaw na babui grilling near the bridge - sweet and meaty!

Also copra on the boat from Balinguan, rain outside the stilt village, the inside of the warehouse in Cagayan (smoke, tar, rubber), and mr. Dee's house in Mambajao.

Durian, of course, and dried fish (daing). Salty ferments. Stale sweetness. Spilled condiments and strange fires.
At night, smouldering katol.

I shall not mention the burning canefields, or the grass square outside of the school buildings where the PC interrogated captured NPA.


EDIBLE - OF COURSE!

Mostly, the smell-memories are tropic, and induce hunger. And perhaps part of that has to do with what I cooked for dinner last Sunday: Chicken Adobo (chicken chunks in a soy and vinegar gravy with garlic and peppercorns), steamed fatty pork with shredded ginger and fish paste on bruised lemon grass, braised long beans with mild yellow curry and red chilies. Plus various vegetable accompaniments. There was a touch of stinky fish-product in everything. The kitchen smelled like a Philippino flop-house afterwards.

I wish there were a place around here where I could get tapsilog for lunch. Not too hep on Jollibee, though. It lacks that auntie touch.



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