The Mystery of the Baking Cookies Smell
Back in December, about a week before Christmas, we got a couple of inches of snow, just enough to stick in the trees and fully cover the grass and feel a little magical. While it was snowing, E and I stepped out onto our balcony and the air smelled like baking cookies. It really felt like a marshmallow world in the winter.
But, why did the air smell sugary sweet? Were our neighbors baking Christmas cookies? Not exactly.
The mystery of the baking cookies smell started back in August when we first moved into this apartment. We were biking down the street near our new home one day, when we passed through an incredibly sweet-smelling intersection. We looked around for a bakery or a grocery store that could be responsible, but it's a pretty industrial area - parking lots and factories, mostly.
"Did a cake truck tip over in that intersection?" We wondered jokingly.
And then we sort of forgot about it, until it happened again. We were biking through the same intersection on a different day and it smelled just as sweet as the first time. So, not a freak cake truck accident, but also not a constant smell. There are times when we walk or bike in that direction and it doesn't smell any different from the intersections around it.
We also smell sweets from within our apartment sometimes. One evening, soon after we moved in, E called me over to a window at the back of the house. He had opened the window wide and was taking big gulps of air. "One of our neighbors must be baking cinnamon rolls or something!" He said, and I agreed. It smelled delicious.
Then in September, E went for a bike ride with a coworker in Tempelhofer Feld, which is pretty close to our home. He mentioned the mysterious baking cookies smell to his coworker and she pointed to a tall building nearby and said, "It's probably the Bahlsen factory."
That's right, one of the factories in the industrial area near our apartment makes cookies. And when they're baking, it floods the neighborhood with a sugary smell.
Earlier this week, E invited me out onto the balcony by saying, "it's a cookie day." We stood out in the cold and breathed in the sweet-smelling air and E commented, "I think we smell cookies here as often as we used to smell cigarette smoke at our old apartment."
Cigarette smoke has been a real problem for us since we moved to Berlin. We can't stand the smell, partly because it's objectively disgusting and breathing it is bad for our health, and partly because the apartment fire that claimed most of our belongings in 2014 was caused by our chain smoking downstairs neighbors. We've had four apartments in Berlin and this is the first one where we haven't had to regularly close our windows on hot summer days to keep smoke from drifting in.
An apartment where we didn't have to put up with secondhand smoke would already have been a great improvement. But an apartment where we traded cigarette smoke for the smell of baking cookies? It's the best.