smellscaping
If there is any other place near the UP Diliman campus that could serve as a playing field of sorts as far as power/class relations are concerned, it must be where the rich and pretentious rich stereotypically hang out after classes (or even during classes), and its contrast with the rest of the scene’s elements. I chose to do a smellscape of Starbucks Katipunan not only because this is where I usually go to study for big exams, or meet friends and other people there. It is also because I have long noticed a striking contrast in the nature of the place, and the poverty of the setting it is situated in.
You can smell the dank, polluted Katipunan air the minute you get down the UP-Katipunan jeep near the overpass going to Ateneo de Manila. The stench – reminiscent of rotten garbage fused with engine smoke – could be, if you’re lucky, blown off with the constant breeze and the fast pace of cars passing by the highway. Then again, if you stay long enough at the foot of the overpass, you might inadvertently introduce yourself to engine smoke from cars pulling over to parking, or cars leaving their rented parking lots. At any rate, you won’t stay here too long. Because you want to go to Starbucks.
A swing of the glass doors with “Starbucks Coffee” vulgarly emblazoned on them usually means a rude introduction to high caffeine. But this is not a simple case of warm, ground coffee beans – the air-conditioning turns the supposedly warm scent into something cold, metallic, and strong, like a coffee-scented cologne with preservatives and additives polluting the integrity of the original scent. There is also a certain saccharine quality to the scent (calling it sweet would say so little about it) that makes it impossible to bear for long. If you smell it long enough, the cold, metallic coffee scent could suddenly have traces of sugar, mint, chocolate, and mocha to it. Thereby, if you’re into such a scent, inducing you to order an overpriced cup.
A little tour around the relatively small shop also lets out metallic scents of elelctronic gadgets (cellphones, laptops, digital cameras) laced with different fragrances (fruity for the ladies, musky for the men). However warm and fuzzy these scents might come across, though, their base scent is still metallic and industrial. Like a slab of steel sprayed with coffee-scented cologne.
This metallic coffee scent extends to the restroom, although it is in this place where competition between coffee and soap begins. If you’re sensitive enough, you might make a distinction between the coffee and the soap scents, and where they lay in that enclosed cubicle.
Once you’ve had tolerably enough of the caffeine, you might want to step outside and pair it with nicotine to give your heart a full palpitation workout. Because the lanai of the Starbucks Katipunan branch is, by default, a smoker’s garden, almost everyone smokes in this area. If you can discriminate, you can smell smoke with mint (Marlboro Lights Menthol, Capri Menthol, Yves Saint Laurent Menthol, West Ice), smoke with a sweet acerbic tone (Gudang Garam), smoke with fruit (DJ Mix) and just plain smoke (Marlboro, Winston, Dunhill, Camel), all dancing together like they are in their own parallel universe. They dance and mingle, but they never mix. There are no intermarriages here, but the nicotine smoke, which is less assaulting than engine smoke but more insidious, overpowers the virgin nostrils and turns the experience into some sort of a duel.
But step outside a little more, beyond the air-barriered confines of this mass-production coffee shop, and the caffeine ceases to exist. Amid the scandalously expensive cars that line the Starbucks pocket lot, the scent of elbow grease, mud, rain, cheap cigarettes, engine smoke, and dying foliage fill the air. The smell of frying/grilling meat from nearby restaurants Tia Maria’s Cantina and Chiggy’s occasionally make a surprise appearance. But still, in is in this area that the posturings of safety that expensive caffeine and nicotine no longer mean anything. The smell of the parking lot and the adjacent highway in this long Katipunan stretch is the predominant outdoor smell everywhere else. Unlike the scent of the sanitized confines of Starbucks, the smell outside is alive, strong, overpowering and real.
