A Sunset in Tel Aviv: The Smell of the Evening

The evening I keep going back to is Tel Aviv. I had been home from that trip for weeks and I could still smell it, which had never happened to me before with a place. Not the big things. The small ones. I wanted the smell in the room with me and there was no way to buy it, because it was not a perfume. It was a whole evening.

Here is the evening. I was walking on the beach at the end of a long, hot day. It was too late in the afternoon for anyone to be doing anything useful, so nobody was. Families were still out. Someone was playing music from a phone. The sand had stopped burning and started to hold warmth instead, so you could sit on it and not move for an hour.

The smells came in layers. First the sea, which is not a clean smell if you pay attention. Salt and something green and slightly sour, like the water has been working on the rocks all day. Then the food, because the beach in Tel Aviv does not let you forget the city behind it. Warm sesame from a stand a block away. Lemon cut on a board. A faint sweetness of fruit or syrup drifting over from somewhere. Coffee in a small plastic cup that had gone cold in my hand while I was busy looking at the water.

And under all of it, that dark roasted thing that shows up in the evening in a hot city. It is part restaurant, part car exhaust, part stone that has been in the sun since morning and is only now letting go of it. People call that smell bad. It is not bad. It is what a city smells like when it finally relaxes.

So I wrote it down instead, in the order I noticed it. First the sea, then the food, then that dark roasted thing underneath. Warm sesame is close to skin. It is what makes the whole evening feel like a place rather than a smell.

Tel Aviv is the first city on this site.