Why does everywhere smell like green tea?
If the look of the non-place is the generic hipster coffee shop, then its smell is undoubtedly green tea.
This essay begins with a decidedly unromantic olfactory recollection. It’s about as far away from Proust as you can get. It begins with the smell of the toilets at Brussels airport.
The first time I walked into the toilets of that auspicious European hub, I remember feeling pleasantly surprised. An airport toilet can smell like many things, none of which I feel the need to describe in detail here. It’s rare, however, for your nose to catch the bright rasp of citrus, the sparky top note of lemongrass, and to be transported back to holidays in southeast Asia. I couldn’t figure out where the scent came from, and assumed it was someone’s perfume or body spray, until I returned many, many times to Brussels airport over the years and realised it was, in fact, pumped throughout the entire structure. I saw the massive diffusers for the first time last month as I glugged down the contents of my water bottle before security. A far cry from the wispy opaque glass things you find lining the windows of Muji or beauty salons, these are grey metal grids whose sole purpose, it seems, is to make those airport toilets a little less unpleasant.
I’ve since learned that this evocative fragrance is supposed to be ‘green tea’. I know this because, over the past few years, I have been unable to escape it.
It is the smell of hotel lobbies in Taiwan and China, of strip-lit souvenir shops at night markets where manufactured cuteness is peddled for cheap in the form of boba kitten keyrings and Pusheen phone cases. It is the smell of the aisle of a bullet train once the cleaning cart has been through, a kind of aromatic chemtrail symbolically renewing the space for the next journey. It is the smell of the Elizabeth Arden body spray I habitually spritz myself with at Duty Free, as if it’ll provide me with some kind of armour against the dry air and miasma of tedium on a long-haul flight.
In January 2024, I encountered that scent once again as I paced aimlessly through possibly the most soulless shopping mall I’ve ever been to, in the city of Doha. Try as they might, the zesty notes absolutely failed to pep me up. In fact, I found them cloying and sickly. I was yet again in-between: several hours into an overnight stopover between Qatar and Australia; between the hotel and the airport; between time zones. I felt cynically repulsed by that fragrance that now seemed trashy because of its ubiquity. It seemed to match the bright sterility of the mall, as plasticky as the multicoloured tat for sale at Miniso. Perhaps it was simply green tea saturation point. Perhaps it was because the aggressively perky aroma seemed as out-of-place as I felt.
That was eighteen months ago. Since then, I have been to twenty-seven countries. It’s become a great source of commentary among my friends, to the point where one questioned whether my travels were simply ‘an elaborate form of homelessness’. It’s not quite true, but in 2024 I did spend more days out of Belgium than in it. If I were there on a visa, I’d probably have been deported. I wish I were earning vast amounts of air miles with all this, but the only thing I’ve achieved so far is a free KLM upgrade to Premium Economy that was worse than my original Economy seat (not least because my vegetarian meal featured a chicken salad), and £5 off the odd Eurostar journey.
However, if there were a loyalty scheme for hours spent feeling unmoored - staring blankly at featureless walls in airport boarding gates; feeling paradoxically too bored to do anything, eleven hours into a flight; shifting restlessly in the uncomfortable zone between asleep and awake on yet another train journey; ruining my body with whatever processed food I can find to fill those gaps - I’d have a platinum card by now.
If T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock famously measured out his life in coffee spoons, lately I feel like I can measure mine out in inhalations of ‘green tea’. Or perhaps I can’t. Perhaps all those individual measures just coalesce, elided into one gigantic, fragranced in-breath.
Last year, I read an excellent article in the Guardian: ‘The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same’. Kyle Chayka described the ubiquity of the ‘hipster coffee joint’ and the ‘millennial aesthetic’, arguing that cafes all over the world, ‘despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other [...] had all drifted toward the same end point.’ Think long wooden tables, exposed ceiling pipes, dangling lights with oversized bare bulbs, hanging planters, and sparse menus without currency symbols. Flat white - 3. Homemade kombucha - 4.5. You know the latte art will be on point, and there will be an aesthetically pleasing untreated wood or marble countertop on which to pose your beverage for social media likes prior to consumption. There will probably be a ‘laptop ban’ between certain hours, and your coffee cup is unlikely to have a handle.
Chayka linked this to the rise of the algorithm in apps such as Instagram and Google Maps. Businesses couldn’t simply just exist in the real world: they had to have a parallel online existence, too, and for this they had to produce the type of content that would garner the most engagement. Read: latte art and hyggelig interiors. He speculated that homogeneity might be an inevitable consequence of algorithmic globalisation, ‘simply because so many like-minded people are now moving through the same physical spaces, influenced by the same digital platforms.’ Academic Sarita Pillay Gonzalez noted the tendency for new hospitality businesses, particularly in gentrifying neighbourhoods, to offer ‘a globally accessible space. You’re able to hop from Bangkok to New York to London to South Africa to Mumbai and you can find that same feel. You can ease into that space because it’s such a familiar space.’ Yet ‘the irony of it all is that these spaces are supposed to represent spaces of individuality, but they’re incredibly monotonous.’
Chayka’s article filled me with that wonderful frisson of recognition you get when someone finally puts words to something you’ve noticed deep in your subconscious, but also gave me a little pang of guilt. For, according to the article, I am the algorithm’s dream: both its victim and its perpetuator; the nomad to whom a bare-brick coffee shop with Danish light fixtures and uncomfortable seating is a siren call. (If you want to know my favourites - should I feel guilty about perpetuating the cycle? - they’re Bocca Coffee in Amsterdam, Way in Ghent, and La Cabra in Aarhus).
Chayka coined the term ‘AirSpace’ to refer to this ‘phenomenon of sameness’, where you could travel the world without ‘leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic’. The concept was originally inspired by the phenomenon that is Airbnb, but also ‘the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere’. Travelling between them, Chayka wrote, is
frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers [...] take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started. It’s possible to travel all around the world and never leave AirSpace, and some people don’t.
Just last month, the Guardian published an article on the rise of digital nomadism in Lisbon, citing the swarming brunch spots clogging the city’s pavements (you already know what they look like inside) and the cloned co-working spaces with all signage in English. AirSpace is a coloniser.
This has not gone unnoticed or undocumented. Chayka cites Rochelle Short, a former Airbnb Superhost in Seattle, who noted that Airbnb had changed in recent years. It has, itself, become gentrified; its demographic has changed. Where before it attracted open-minded and easy-going travellers, Short noted, now it lures - I can almost hear the disdain in her voice - ‘vanilla tourists’.
Or, I’d venture, green tea tourists.
Recently, I encountered my old friend again; perhaps not uncoincidentally, in an Airbnb. It took the form of a small fragrance stick diffuser atop the bathroom cabinet in a tiny flat in Djerba, a small island off the coast of Tunisia. Am I in Brussels airport, I wondered as I peed out yet another cup of bittersweet - and, coincidentally, green - Tunisian tea. Am I in the toilet of a shopping mall in Doha, wishing my life away? Am I in a Taiwanese trinket store? Where, really, am I?
If the look of the non-place is the generic hipster coffee shop, then its smell is undoubtedly green tea. Green tea is the inescapable scent-track to a life lived mostly in AirSpace.
As I read Chayka’s article, I couldn’t help but recall what scholar Marc Augé has termed, in his book on the topic, the ‘non-place’. The non-place is the opposite of the sociological notion of place: a culture localized in time and space. It’s somewhere, flattened and homogenised the world over, within which people are paradoxically always, and yet never, at home. A quintessential example is the airport, though we might also include highways, shopping malls (hello Doha), and hotels in the list. Augé writes that ‘the installations needed for the accelerated circulation of passengers and goods (high-speed roads and railways, interchanges, airports) are just as much non-places as the means of transport themselves’. They are, emphatically, not meeting spaces (despite what the opening sequence of Love Actually might suggest); in fact, their intention is that we remain anonymous within them. They are supposed to be insignificant, never truly inhabited.
The more I travel, the more I recognise these non-places, and the way they impact my mind and body. Chakya discusses this too:
The procession to the flight and then the numbing experience of flying itself involves a kind of stripping-away of the self and surroundings until everything becomes smooth and uniform. It’s a recognisable feeling – that slight separation from reality that happens when the plane takes off, or the clean burst of anonymity when opening the door of a hotel room for the first time.
I revel in the latter only because it usually means I am, finally, able to rest: horizontally, in silence, and without the aggressive background noise of an aeroplane engine. But my overriding feeling of these non-places, of my own non-emplacement, is, just as Chakya says, numbness. Not just literal, from hard plastic airport seating or aggressive air conditioning, but emotional too.
In one of the early episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, still my all-time favourite television series, a girl called Marcie Ross gradually becomes invisible because all the cool kids at school fail to notice her. One day, she puts her hand up in class, only to watch it melting away at the elbow into thin air. Perhaps something like this is happening to me - to us, residents-yet-not-residents of the non-place. With every hour shuffled away uncomfortably on industrial airport seating, every moment lost in blank doomscrolling during a queue to board a flight, perhaps another cell of our bodies loses its ability to belong anywhere, and migrates to the ether. If we live most of our lives in non-places, are we non-people?
Perhaps one day I’ll find myself stuck in the in-between: like Harry Potter, if he became immured in the barrier on Platform Nine and Three Quarters, or Alice, if she ate too many jam tarts and couldn’t get her hips back up through the rabbit hole. I’ll be a paradox: a permanent resident of the non-place; granted settled status in Liminality; always, and yet never, at home. And I’ll know it, because everything everywhere will smell of bloody green tea.
The thing I find most offensive about the green tea takeover is that there’s not a whiff of green tea about it. Having spent an inordinate amount of time in the non-place in order to travel to tea plantations all over the world and enjoy tea in its multitudinous forms, I can attest that green tea smells nothing like the bright, slightly limey wisps puffing out of those mass diffusers at Brussels airport. Green tea is not bright or limey, not the scent of shopping malls or transport hubs. Green tea is profoundly vegetal, sharp, petrocoric. It is the scent of damp leaves, day-old grass cuttings, moss underfoot. It is elusive and impish, the first catch on the nose as you turn the key to a secret garden. Green tea must be earned, its aroma unlocked through just-right heated water temperatures, appropriate teaware, and the judicious scattering of leaves. It is not yours to claim as you turn the corner into the Ladies. Green tea deserves better.