Smoldering Ashes

Although not perhaps the black sheep of the family, smell is often underappreciated. A smell can place you in time and place. A passing stranger wearing a certain cologne can conjure up pictures of a lost grandparent. A baking cookie can say without sound, welcome to a visitor. For me, the smell of incense is becoming undeniably intertwined with Hong Kong.

As with any large city, Hong Kong has a different smell almost every block - orchids in the park, beer on the street after a big game, and sweat from the person sitting next to you on the bus. But for all the varieties of things that I come across in a given day, every time I pass by a place that is burning incense, I think, man, I am living in Hong Kong.

While not a common occurrence on the street, you see incense a lot at the different religious monuments around town. Buddhists use incense like many Christian religions would use candles. There are big incense burners and miniature one. My favorites are the big ones, and when I say big, I mean big.

If I were to be standing next to this incense burner, I would come up just passed the beginning of the roof. This particular burner is at the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island, also the home of the big Buddha.

Incense is burned all day and likely all night at many shrines and can ever be purchased in tubes that had I not known I would have thought were large bottle rockets or Roman candles.

Growing up I thought of incense as another form of potpourri. Potpourri gives me headaches. Once I even got a bloody nose just as I knelt down to smell potpourri. I don't like potpourri to this day. I like incense. It's subtle and sweet. A good incense doesn't force itself on you but let's you find it.

Perhpas that's why I like Hong Kong but not Tokyo. Hong Kong is gentle and subtle in its uniqueness, presenting a new present to a visitor with each changing block. Tokyo is garish and overpowering in its greetings, flashing neon and people everywhere. When I visited my brother in Japan after high school, I never would have imagined coming back to Asia to live, but here I am. And I love it.