Geeky Traveller

Smell your city of choice

by Sherry on February 21st, 2008

At first glance, this is one of the strangest “gadgets” I have ever seen or heard of - the AIR is a bubble that will use your olfactory memory to remind you of different cities. Hilda Kozari created three bubbles that replicate the smells of Helsinki, Budapest, and Paris.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? And yet, if you think about it, our sense of smell is the strongest of all five senses. I know that when I opened a box that contained some beautiful tablecloths that belonged to my late grandmother, it wasn’t the image of the cloths that struck the most vivid chord - it was the smell. They smelled like the powder puffs she used to use as sachets in her linen drawers and that was what sent my memory whirling.

When you think of it that way, it’s actually fascinating to think of someone capturing the smells that would remind us of our travels. The salty smell of the ocean, the rich and fruit-laden scent of the jungle, so much more. We can take pictures for visual reminders of the places we’ve seen, we can buy recordings of the music we heard in another country, we can bring home a bottle of sand to touch, we can seek out recipes and ingredients to make the dishes we ate. But the smells? There isn’t much we can do about that. But now it seems we just might be able to someday purchase a scented reminder of the places we have traveled and loved.

I’d love a bubble full of the ocean air on the upper part of the hotel strip in Cancun, maybe another with the smells of the hot and humid jungle surrounding Chichen Itza.

What - or rather, where - would you like to smell right this moment?

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