The lower east side is hip, surprising. There are colors everywhere, unusual textures, dark bars with exotic music and unexpected encounters, the latest news for eager fashionistas, a hidden coffee shop where tatooted girls kick you out if you dare use Starbucks jargon. Explosive bliss of diversity and wonder, at least compared to the upper west side, my usual territory. It would be perfect, satisfy my intense curiosity for detail of everyday life, except I have an extra sensitive nose. An acute sense of smell that compensates my inability to withstand cold or my weak back. And the lower east side smells. Dog urine, human urine, decomposing japanese food leftovers, scattered paper bleached with beer, even a few soiled blankets next to the recently composted park, which restricts the grass behind fences. My nose wrinkles, my eyebrows furrow from the other summer fragance, the smelly one. This morning, I try to separate the unpleasant smells from the good ones since I still have to walk six more avenues to get to the subway and I'm too sleepy to distract myself with the visual wonder. I try to trick my nose receptors into focusing on the tiny flower beds scattered through the street, pick up some lost thread of coffee from the closest coffee shop, there's one on 5th Avenue and 8th street. Mmhh...I could probably map this city with its coffee shops, I try a mental map of my favorite ones, if I connect them they form a triangle. I walk, and my nose insists on behaving more canine than human, it picks every scent, even the traces of each person that goes by me in their morning rush towards work. A gardenia and basil woman, a pear with a hint of grass after the rain girl, a lavender shaved beard and, yes, several soiled and forgotten laundry men, three dogs that need a bath. I absorb 8th and C, and 7th and 1st avenue, and Astor place, then one of the oldest streets (Gay Street, ironically) and finally, Christopher street and Broadway, where the scents of the subway are ready to go in through my nose and into my memories of this city. It never really stops.