Smells

It's true what they say . . . you can be walking along through your day-to-day life and then all of a sudden, with no warning, you're taken back to some point in your past by something you smell. It seems so strange when it happens. Last week, as I walked home from school, I smelled cotton candy. Weird. I did find out that they have cotton candy here. Trey said it smelled like bubblegum. It reminded me of fall fairs at home.

Here the smells range from big city smells (cigarette smoke, diesel fumes, car exhaust) to particularly Latin American smells (chicken roasting over coffee beans--YUM!--frijoles and rice cooking, and fried food, cologne) to regular everyday smells (laundry detergent--that is different from home but still nice (some of it), and cleaning smells, shampoo, etc.)

All of the houses are open and very close to the street, so as you walk around, you can catch snippets of conversations, hear pots and pans clanking together, the swish-swish of a broom, a TV or radio playing, but most of all, you can smell what they are doing--cleaning, cooking, showering.

Last weekend, we went with the school to a restaurant on a little mountain above the city. We enjoyed typical Costa Rican food by candlelight, and when the fog lifted, we were able to look down in the valley and see the lights of San Jose twinkling in the night. It was beautiful. My favorite part was not the beauty of the lights in the distance, nor the taste of the delicious food, nor the time out away from school with friends, although all of those were great.

My favorite part of the evening was the opportunity to smell woodsmoke for the first time this fall. The restaurant had a fireplace which we smelled as soon as we got off the bus. Some of our fellow missionaries here are from much colder states than South Carolina, but we all talked about the same thing. How wonderful it is to smell woodsmoke, which we had taken for granted before.