The Weekend of Two Cities

So, this last weekend I took full advantage of the 1-Euro bus service in the region and went to two very different places, Grasse on Saturday and Monaco/Monte-Carlo on Sunday.

For all you uneducated people out there (don't worry, I didn't know this myself until I went there), the little and unnoticeable town of Grasse has maintained, for centuries, the status of the perfume capital of the world. At first sight, there is nothing special about it: no huge cathedral in the middle, no especially picturesque houses clinging to steep cliffs, no secret mountain lake... But, walking through the 'downtown', famous names immediately catch your attention: Molinard, Galinard, and Fragonard are all based here, offering free visits of their still-working perfume factories that bring in over 600,000,000 euros a year. In fact, two-thirds of France's natural aromas are produced in this little town that hides its immense wealth behind old and battered building façades.

We walked into the Fragonard factory - not because we had any special preferences, but just because they happened the first parfumerie that we noticed. The free guided visit exceeded any and all of my expectations. The lady was unbelievably nice and knew all there is to know about the workings of a perfume factory. She explained to us the specifics of hot grease extraction - when heaps of flowers are thrown into a cauldron of melted animal fat and stirred until the fat absorbes all the odor - and cold grease extraction, used for flowers so fragile that they lose their scent immediately upon contact with hot fat, which involves sticking the flowers to a layer of spread-out cold fat and waiting for the fat to slowly absorb the odorant molecules. She showed us the room with containers holding thousands of liters of some of the world's most expensive perfumes - did you know that, to make one liter of the "essence" of a particular flower, you need to collect between two and three thousand pounds of petals? We also got to see the room where the soap is being made (and the only room where I managed to take some photos when the guide turned away, as photography is STRICTLY forbidden - take a look on Picasa!) and, finally, the laboratory. This is where the "nose" works (that's really what they call them), sitting in front of an "organ" of smells. The organ consists of countless tiny bottles and flasks, arranged in many rows, containing all or almost all distinct smells used in perfume production, and a large mixing flask in the middle.

The guide told us about the education required to become a nose. There are only three schools in the entire world: one in Grasse, one in Paris, and one somewhere in Switzerland. The exam that you have to pass at the end requires you to be able to distinguish and name over 500 different smells, as well as be capable of smelling a complex perfume and breaking it down into the individual components. At the end of the tour, the guide let us smell samples of some of the perfumes currently on sale in their store and challenged us to guess what components were present in them. An average perfume that you buy in the store is composed of 25 to 250 different individual scents (about 150 on average), but picking up even the basic and most prominent ones is harder than it seems. I succeeded at finding vanilla in one of the samples and lemon in another, but that was about it... If you're at all interested in all of this, you should absolutely read the book "Perfume" by Patrick Süskind - it's way too freaky and crazy, but definitely a worthwhile read.

Oh, and Grasse is also full of cats of all breeds and sizes. It's a random observation, but you really can't help noticing all the felines... They're everywhere. One even attacked us and chased us away from the town hall - I don't know if he was trained to do that, or if he just happened to find our company too unpleasant.

The Principality of Monaco that we visited on Sunday yielded somewhat fewer memories, but was still worth the bus ride. It's a tiny little sovereign state surrounded by France and the Mediterranean, with a prince from the Grimaldi royal family which has ruled the principality since 1297. Monaco collects very few taxes, and so millionaires from all over Europe buy apartments in the high-rise buildings and declare them as their primary residences, thus evading the taxes they would have had to pay in the country where they actually live. Most of the millionaires don't really spend too much of their time there, and the people on the streets are generally tourists. You do see the occasional Ferrari or Jaguar driving up to a house, though, so I guess the millionaires do come every once in a while to pay their bills and do some cleaning in the near-empty flats. Monte-Carlo was a little disappointing, with a single casino that was very low-key and discreet - nothing on the scale of Las Vegas or even Altlantic City. We didn't even go in because the casino charges 10 euros just for entering the premises.

I'm leaving to Geneva in two days! Had to struggle through about 20 minutes of panic today when I realized that Switzerland is not a Schengen country (I only have a Schengen visa), but then it turned out that they do not require a visa from U.S. citizens OR Green Card holders, whew!

I guess the next post will be describing Amsterdam and Geneva adventures... See you later!