I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but every country has a distinct smell. If you travel much you will definitely start to notice. People have their own smell, homes have their own smell, cities have their own smell, collectively adding up to a distinct national smell. As we approached Quito on our flight in you could see it sparkling below stretched out in the Andes like a river. The city is about 3 miles wide and 25 miles long. I anticipated everything but the smell. It took me a little while for the smell to register but once at our hotel I remarked to Deeanne “this smells like Ecuador.” This brought back fond memories for me. I won’t tell you which countries smell badly so as not to offend anyone.
Two friends, both doctors, told me the sense of smell and emotional memory are strongly connected because of their location in the brain. This may be due to the olfactory system’s close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that are known to be involved in emotion and place memory. It is hard to describe the smell of Ecuador but I will give it a try. Imagine taking powdered laundry detergent (the cheap kind) mixing that with fresh air, throw in a whiff of trash rotting, and a combine some rubber from a tennis ball, there you have it the smell of Ecuador. You may think this is negative but realize this is 3 parts fresh laundry detergent to 1 part other trace smells.
A typical day in Ecuador smells like this. You wake up to fresh laundry detergent. The soap in the bathroom smells like… well soap, the basic kind. The room smells musty; not the normal musty, but high altitude musty. The 6 blocks from our hotel to the language school smell, in no particular order, of burning trash, bananas, and freshly baked bread. We stop for the bananas and bread and skirt the burning trash smell. For the return trip it has rained and so smells like fresh rain with a hint of burnt trash, stale bread, ripe bananas, and wet dog. We take a deep breath when we walk into our room – the smell is refreshingly homey [high altitude musty].
Deeanne feeds a cute stray on the street by our hotel
Our Room in Plaza Internacional Quito
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