I really, really did not intend to go to Grasse two days in a row. But things happened and here we are. But before I go into why I went to Grasse twice in a row, let’s go back to the start.

Because my class schedule changes every week, there are times where I have an extra free day. Like last Friday, which was totally free. So a friend and I decided to go to Grasse, and since Grasse is basically the perfume capital of France, we decided to book a perfume workshop at Fragonard. It’s not cheap; we managed to get it for 59 euros (the original price was 69), but we figured it would be worth it because we’d get 100ml of a customised perfume at the end.

So Friday came and we boarded the 500 bus from Parc Phoenix. As with all buses, the ride is 1.50 euros and we can use our travel pass so we were feeling really happy about the trip. The journey took about an hour and the old town is really close to the bus stop – less than ten minutes on foot. We got a map from the tourist office and started exploring.

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Grasse may be the perfume capital but I feel like most of the day was based on food. First, while exploring the old town, we came across this nougat shop. I’m normally not a nougat person but I was enticed by the free samples and the lady manning the shop was very enthusiastically letting us try a bunch of nougats.

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The lavender and violet ones were great, but honestly, the one that stole my heart was the truffle nougat. Yes, TRUFFLE!!! I love truffle chips but I never thought that truffles would work well in a nougat because nougats are sweet, but somehow this worked. It’s also extremely expensive, costing 119.90 euros per kg. But this is why it’s great to travel with a friend because the shop sells them by weight and after we had them cut a piece of nougat, we had them cut the piece in half and we bought half each. It was about 120g of nougate for half a slice and while it’s pricey, it’s not as too exorbitant.

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After walking some more and looking for views, because Grasse is situated pretty high up and you can see a really pretty valley, we walked back to the centre of the old town (near the tourism office) to try the Les Delicatessen de Grasse. This deli opens from noon to eleven, but in our case, the deli seemed to only be ready for customers around twelve-thirty. It was really worth it though – the guy running the place was very friendly (he has been to Singapore and apparently loved it!! I was so pleased to hear it!) and the platters were delicious. We had the gourmet platter for 34 euros plus a glass of rose each and it was delicious! I really enjoyed the garlic spread and the truffle cheese.

Unfortunately, things went wrong after lunch. Remember that perfume workshop I talked about? Well, we went there at two, only to realise that we went to the wrong Fragonard factory. There are apparently two factories in Grasse – one in town and one about 15 minutes away by car. Our workshop was at the further one, and they have a policy of not letting people join midway.

Honestly, I was pretty devasted at the news. The lady who called me did give me an address to write to and we immediately sent them an email explaining our mistake. And now that we had a lot of free time, we decided to explore a little more.

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The next place we went to was The Museum of Provençal Costumes and Jewellery because clothes are cool and entry is free. The museum is rather small and the explanations are entirely in French, but if you’re interested in learning about fashion and jewellery from the end of the 18th century to the 19th century, then you should pop by this museum! I was lucky that I could read about 10% of the explanations and my friend filled in the rest.

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After the museum, we walked over to Fragonard’s factory in the old town (the museum is maybe 100m away from the factory) and went for a free tour. I’ve already toured the Fragonard factory in Eze, but I still learned new things here, such as:

• Grasse was originally a town for tanners. But because they’re also a place where flowers grow, someone started scenting the leather to cover the smell. This caught on and well, tanners eventually became perfumers.
• The most important flower in Grasse is the jasmine, whose harvest season is from July to October.
• Perfume has to be macerated (aged) for at least three weeks before filtering! Here, we got to sniff some of the filters – they look like giant coffee filters to me!
• For fragile materials, like jasmine, a process called cold extraction is used to extract their essential oils. In the past, this involved using animal fats to absorb the fragrance, changing flowers every day for 30 days. The scented compounds are then washed in alcohol to produce absolutes. Today, a chemical solvent is used to get the absolute and the process is much shorter, taking only one day. That said, it still takes one ton of jasmine flowers to produce one kilogram of absolute, so as you can see, this is an expensive process.

While waiting for the tour to start, I decided to call the Fragonard customer service department. To my joy, they offered to let us reschedule the workshop! Since we both have class next Friday, we decided to reschedule our workshop for the Saturday workshop, which is conducted in French.

Will I survive this with my meagre French skills? Stay tuned!