The oft absent olfactory element

There is one thing that my writing often lacks and I feel it's because it's the one sense we forget most easily;  smell.

More than anywhere else I've traveled, Korea  is permiated by pungent and powerful smells.  The smell of kimchi in a supermarket, the reek of sewers and stormdrains, the sickly sweet rot of garbage and compost by the trees, or the clean cool rush of air off the mountains.
Korea smells.

It's perhaps one of the first things I noticed when I came here, yet it's often the first thing I forget to mention.  In the States we usually don't appreciate just how oderless our communities are.  I suppose that can be a good thing, but their is a profound element of life that is lost when there isn't anything to smell besides air and car exhaust.  Korea has those things, plus the many shades of reek that seem to slap you in the face every few steps in the street.

There are good smells and foul.  The foul seem to stand out more, but I love the smell of a galbi restuarant in the cool autumn evening that still throws open it's sliding doors and lets the scent of roasting pork and fermented vegtables out into the night.  Sometimes passing a bakery leaves you with the sickly sweet smell of exceedingly surgary Korean bread products, the kind of smell that seems familiar at first but makes itself distinct as you feel the sugar high kick in just from a quick whiff of it's near pheremone-like sweetness.

So many smells, even the trees smell from time to time.  Korea possesses some unique trees, one which I've been told (by Koreans) occassionally posseses the smell of "ripe semen." Needless to say I find this description raises more questions than answers.  From what trees I've smelled, "ripe semen" is not the nearest equivalent I'd come up with for the local foliage.

Recently I went hiking in the Children's Park in Busan.  A lovely large nature reserve in the midst of the city.  The Children's park has much more than playgrounds and meeting places, but it also sports an "aromatic forest." Here there is a large population of coniferous Korean trees, similar to Chinese Juniper trees.  Here the air has a vaguely pine scent.  My coworkers assured me that the air here was extremely healthy and encouraged me to breathe deeply as we walked through the woods.  I must admit I greatly enjoyed the aromatic forest in the Children's Park.  The trees there are unique and the trails are not nearly as rocky and treacherous as other trails I've encountered in Korea.

There are so many smells out there in the wide world, and though most of them will cause us to cringe, it's worth taking a moment to smell the roses.  This is particularly true in Asia, but I hope I never fail to appreciate all my senses have to offer even when I make my way back to the West.