Folle d'Amouage in Abu Dhabi and Fragrant Food in Islamabad

I'm relaxing in my friend A__'s living room in Islamabad, sipping lemongrass tea and listening to the sounds of the garden and the street.  How wonderful it is to be here again!  Even in winter.  I like spending Christmas in Pakistan precisely because hardly anyone celebrates it in a serious way, and so there's less hoopla.

The electricity was out during most of Christmas day, and A__'s oven is electric, so we cooked the turkey on her gas stove top, by the light of candles and flashlights.  The power came back on just as the guests arrived, allowing us to brown the meat and make the finishing touches.  The aromas of turkey and spiced apple tea were, well, fabulous!  Fabulous to taste, too.

During the past few days I've looked in on a half-dozen shopowners with whom I've become friends, to visit and catch up on events in Pakistan.  I've sipped sweet green tea and fragrant pink Kashmiri chai while poring over ibex shawls, bolts of silk brocade and lengths block-printed cotton.  There was a wonderful hour in the Khussa Palace in F-10 - khussas are embroidered slippers, an exotic alternative to ballet flats:

I flew here via Abu Dhabi, and had a few hours to sniff in the airport perfume shop....

Tom Ford Violet Blonde
A cloud of purple violets.  I wish I could keep the green opening and give up the rest.   Unfortunately, it quickly turns all purple, and has the snotty note of certain florals, which I find off-putting for the hour or so that it takes to subside.

Tom Ford Tuscan Leather 

This should be called Etruscan Wood.  Powerful, literal.  I like it, and would probably like the kind of man who could pull it off.

Tom Ford Tobacco Vanilla
This is exactly what it says on the label.  It made me think of a freshly-shaved man in a bakery at Christmastime - which is no bad thing, except that as a scent image it grows a little tiresome.

I'd have more to say about the Tom Fords if I hadn't found a tester of Amouage Honour for Woman.  My first association upon smelling this was peach-flavoured Yoplait, my favourite at age 6.  But this is not Yoplait - it's warm, golden, vamped-up, sexy peaches in the sun!

This being Amouage, the actual notes are jasmine, gardenia and amber, anchored with incense and spice.  I ADORE it.  I contemplated that big, beautiful white bottle for the time it took for the sales assistant to look up the price, almost USD 200.  Saved again.  But I can't guaranty I'll hold out indefinitely.

I've brought several Amouage samples with me on this trip.  I could say I'm getting into this line slowly, but really, it's more like straight-up, immediate love, particularly for the really opulent ones.  Maybe it's because I'm living in the Middle East right now; maybe it's my age; maybe it's because I love the aesthetic of things that are well-made with a touch of drama.  Whatever the reasons, I'm an Amouage fan.  My friend A__,  who loves perfume too, smelled Memoir Woman and said "Oo, I'd love to smell that on a man.  I'd be all over him!"  Totally.

Today, along with jeans and borrowed sweater, I'm wearing a Pakistani winter shawl and Ubar.  Shawl and perfume are perfect partners - they're both big, billowing masses of flowers layered over an animalic base (wool and civet, respectively).  If big floral + civet sounds scary, it isn't.  Ubar is powerful, but it's also smooth, and displays a symphonic depth and breadth that characterizes the best of Amouage.  Lovely.


Photo credits: photo 1 from bluejeansgourmet.com; photo 2 from fragrantica.com

Music for Damascus, in a dangerous time

A friend of mine says that when you live abroad, your highs are higher and your lows are low.  Depending on the place and the intensity of your experience of it, this cycle may be more extreme, or weighted in one direction.  In so many ways, living in Damascus is a tremendous pleasure: it is beautiful here, and I can't imagine that there are nicer people anywhere.  Where else do taxi drivers take you around for free because they want you to feel welcome? (This has happened to me twice now.)

Which makes what's happening now all the more heartbreaking.  As this tumultuous year ends and the pundits try to predict what's ahead, I feel like a sheep stuck in a gate.  There's no going back.  I understand this, objectively; but I have no idea what's ahead, but it is difficult to be optimistic.  In daily life, we carry on 'as normal' - what else is there to do? - with the tacit understanding that sometime soon everything will change, though we don't know how.  Change is already happening, of course; we are all of us busy keeping our feet on constantly shifting ground.  Take Christmas - with electricity and fuel shortages, and the general atmosphere in the city, there are few decorative lights, and relatively little holiday hoopla.  As someone at work said, "All I want for Christmas is for the suffering to stop."

One morning on the way to work, I heard the opening verses of Forever Young, and they just slayed me.

Let's dance in style, let's dance for awhile
Heaven can wait, we're only watching the stars
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst...

Old songs take on new meanings in particular situations.  I admit that crying on the street is a little nuts, but in other ways, music's keeping me sane.  A group of us got together recently to rehearse some cover songs.  I'd forgotten how therapeutic it is to mess around with music.   It was just a rehearsal, but we hit the sweet spot a couple of times, and it felt great.  Next time I'd like to try Lovers in a Dangerous Time by Bruce Cockburn.  This is probably the best known version, but I kinda love Bruce's own.

Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by?
You never get to stop and open your eyes
One minute you're waiting for the sky to fall
The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all...

I wanted to embed Bruce here but for some reason I can't.  Instead here's Youth Group's wistful interpretation of Forever Young.  Alphaville made this song a classic, but I do appreciate it when other musicians find something new and beautiful in an old song.

Fragrance in Damascus: Damascena Rosa, by Biocham

Al-Khawali Restaurant - from Tripadvisor.com

I’m sitting in Al-Khawali restaurant in Old Damascus, at the far end of Straight Street, wedged between the spice souq and a line of little shops that variously sell coffee, homemade soap, nuts and candied fruit.  I enter through a sunken doorway that opens to a foyer lined with photographs of Arab celebrities.  The waiters – men clothed in dark suits and old-world courtesy – lead me to the main dining area, the courtyard of an old beit, or grand Damascene house.  The walls rise several floors above me, a beautiful medley of coloured stone, carved doorways, and leaded windows, surrounding a marble fountain accented with fresh flowers.

Fairouz’s mournful voice soars over the soft clinks of the kitchen and the general restaurant hubbub.  At other tables, Damascene families, groups of young women, businessmen winding down at the end of the day, dine languidly from selections of mezzeh, platters of dumplings in rich yoghurt-tarragon sauce, and pomegranate-laced fatoush. Damascenes are proud of their food, and truly, the dishes at Al-Khawali are wonderful.  My grilled kibbeh and eggplant makdous (infamously described on the menu as ‘stuffed aborigines’) arrive with flatbread, delicately steaming, directly from the barrel-shaped oven beside the cashier’s till.  Kids love to watch the baker as he hurls thin disks of dough against the oven walls, to be cooked to perfection within a few minutes.  

Over Turkish coffee, I examine my latest purchase from Biocham, a local producer of high quality natural extracts.  It's a 1 ml vial of Damascene Rose essential oil, made right here in Damascus.  If the blurb on the Biocham website is true, this is momentous: “the first Damascene rose oil coming from Damascus in a hundred years!”  I unscrew the cap with a slight tremor.  The contents resemble colourless jelly.  A tiny amount smoothed over warm skin unfolds, slowly, luxuriantly, into an incredibly pure and unmistakably pink rose.  The single note is overwhelming at first, too much of a good thing.  I suppose serious perfumistas sniff plenty of high quality extracts, but smelling this makes me realize that the ‘attars’ I’ve encountered before were either mediocre or spoiled.  This is exciting: it hovers above the skin, enveloping one in invisible, super-real pink petals.

I’m not sure I could wear Damascena Rosa on its own - like a song of one note, eventually it would be unbearable.  I can, however, easily imagine using it to intensify the rose note in a blend.  I can’t wait to experiment!