Cheese Truck!

The Smells of Paris

Perfume. Sometimes when I walk past a beautiful person the street I just know they’re going to smell nice. So I wait until they’re just about to pass, then tilt my head a little and take a deep breath. It’s never too flowery or fruity, and always delightful. How do they do it? I just want to stop people and ask them what they’re wearing.

Hyacinths. Levallois-Perret must hire obsessive-compulsive gardeners, because the flowers throughout town seem to change weekly. Right now everything is covered in hyacinths: pink at the Hotel de Ville, purple in the flower boxes on the street, and white in front of the church. You can’t take a walk anywhere without smelling them. Sometimes Dave and I stop to stick our noses in the tall flower boxes or cross streets to take in the scent.

Bakeries. Just like walking past a beautiful person, I like to take a deep breath when I walk past a bakery. It’s so distracting, the baguettes calling to me like sirens, even if we don’t need one for dinner that night. I’ve made the mistake of buying an impulsive baguette that we didn’t end up eating. I think it would be safer if I start walking on the other side of the street and smell the hyacinths instead.

Italian Food. Two doors from our apartment is a cute little Italian place that people rarely sit in, but often order pizza out of. Like most French things or people we can’t remember the names of, we have given the restaurant our own name: Luigi’s. Yes, I know it’s a stereotype, but it's easy to remember.

Every evening, the pizza oven at Luigi’s is working overtime, and the smells are pumped onto the street. When we come home from work and step out of the car it’s the first thing we notice: the smell of pizza. And every night, Dave groans and curses Luigi for doing this to him.

You can also smell Luigi’s from the apartment if you open the windows. We try not to open the windows until after dinner is done.

Cheese. Ever since we moved here, we’ve noticed this weird phenomenon. When we’re driving down the road, usually in the countryside, we’ll suddenly be overwhelmed with the smell of cheese. Naturally, accusations start flying, and then we’ll pass a white paneled truck. We started to assume that these trucks are carrying cheese. It’s unbelievable how far away you can smell it.

What’s funny is that every time we try to tell a French person about the cheese trucks, they look at us like we’ve been eating too much Wisconsin cheddar. Even our French teacher Gil, the most self-aware French person I know, doesn’t know what we’re talking about.

One day I thought I had a French guy pinned. I was driving Stephane to work and smelled a cheese truck up ahead of us in traffic. I said “Quick! Do you smell that? DO YOU SMELL THAT?” He opened the window, took a deep breath, and said “I don’t know. Maybe a little.” Why don’t the French realize that their cheese smells?? Skewed olfactories must be some kind of regional genetic trait, like good skin and natural skinniness.

Toast. Similar to the cheese trucks but more difficult to trace is the smell of toast. Just after we jump on the highway outside of Levallois, we often smell toast on one small section of the road. Dave thinks it’s burned.

We were working on a theory that there’s a diner somewhere next to the highway. This was further supported by the sausages I thought I smelled at the same spot one day. But I really don’t think the French do diners.

So the toast remains a mystery.

Of course, there are bad smells to France, too, like the smell of a packed metro on a hot summer evening, or the evitable smell of an overworked waiter (which are actually very similar scents, as you can imagine), but I won’t go into more detail as to retain the romantic nature of this post.