Irresistible

A long weekend behind me, I'm wondering when and how to describe to you what I've seen: Carnival in Nice, Monaco, the Monte Carlo casino, the Mediterranean in such blue profusion that I don't think I'll ever forget it, Grace Kelly's tombstone, Eze, and a cavalcade of images so intense in light and color, so ineffably beautiful, that I have no words to express them.

And so I think I will start with the last and perhaps simplest of our adventures: the Galimard perfume factory. The Galimard perfume factory was founded in 1747 and is now split between two locations, Grasse and Eze. Grasse, if you would like to know, was one of the major settings in Patrick Süskind's most strange novel, Perfume.

As there were about 50 people in our group (we were traveling with a fellow study abroad program) it was somewhat difficult to fit everyone in the narrow, white-washed hallways of the factory. I'm increasingly glad that our program only has 13 people in it--traveling with this many people is not the most comfortable way of seeing the world. We were led through the museum part of the factory by a slender Dutch woman named Sylvy. The combination of her accent and slightly rehearsed tour commentary made for a hilarious 20 minutes and I wish now I would have written down more of what she said. Although I think my favorite must have been the following: "Shall I tell you about the irresistible perfume? It is a mixture of caramel, jasmine, and vanilla. Ladies, when you put this on the men will want to eat you. How else do you think I get this skinny?"

One aspect about the factory that I found very interesting can be seen in the first picture. In both Grasse and Eze one has the ability (for a price of course--I believe that it was 200€ in Eze) to create one's own perfume. What you are essentially paying for is the opportunity to sit for two hours with someone the perfume world calls a Nose. There are approximately 300 Noses in the world and 2 of them work in Eze. Noses study for roughly 12 years and must be able to identify thousands of scents. They cannot smoke, drink alcohol, eat spicy foods, or swim in chlorinated pools in order to protect their most marketable olfactory organ. What you see in the first picture is the room where you create your perfume. The bottles are darkened so as to increase the longevity of the scents and there were about 3 more rows of these shelves.

In the end, Sylvy's most excellent and rather adorable marketing skills payed off as I was lured into buying some authentic French perfume. It took me forever, but I finally settled on one called Pêle-Mêle, which is composed of bergamot, tangerine, jasmine, lily of the valley, and rose. It smells so amazing that I have to restrain myself from coating all of my belongings in an aromatic pell-mell.