As you probably know by now, Vancouver’s Bloedel Conservatory is home to a very large, very rare Titan arum, or corpse flower. It’s a tropical plant that takes up to 10 years of growth before blooming for the first time and, as its name suggests, stinks like rotting flesh when it does bloom.
How so many people know what rotting flesh smells like is a mystery only matched by Vancouverites’ excitement and desire to inhale the corpse flower’s deathly stench once it blooms.
Clearly there’s an untapped market of stinky things around Vancouver that locals would shell out their hard-earned cash to sniff.
For instance:
- Mayor Gregor Robertson’s left armpit after a sweaty bike ride through the UBC endowment lands the same week Whole Food’s is out of Tom’s Soothing Calendula deodorant.
- The ghost of Roberto Luongo’s tender groin.
- The streets of Marpole after its annual Running of the Incontinent Guinea Pigs.
- Lingering memories of the Canucks 2017/2018 season.
- Mike Reno’s post-Zumba workout slats.
- Chad Kroeger’s sleeping bag.
- The back alley of the Courier, which we treated as a porta-potty for the first two months of our job because no one bothered to show us where the inside washrooms were located and relieving yourself outside is liberating.
- The urinals in the new pop-up restaurant Asparagus Bistro.
- Canucks mascot Fin’s diaper.
