Smoking
“Smoking kills,” says a non-smoker, reading aloud from the cigarette package of a classmate. “So does living,” replies the smoker, and lights up.
Tobacco appears to be the main socially accepted escape. In Lebanon you can smoke anywhere. Restaurants, hotels, taxis. One day on the way to the university, I rode with a taxi driver who smoked the whole way, but smoked these very long, thin cigarettes, the type that what are usually marketed to women. He was strong and somewhat angry looking, with thick rough worker’s hands, carefully chain-smoking these tiny cigarettes, which looked completely out of place in his hands.
You aren’t supposed to smoke on the bus, but people do it anyways. There is a certain desperation to the way people smoke in Lebanon. They tend to smoke constantly, in every situation, before, during and after everything. They drag hard on their cigarettes, and inhale deeply, and smoke them all the way down to the filter. Sometimes they chain smoke, lighting one cigarette off the other one. Smoke breaks during school mean smoking two or more cigarettes one after the other. All social interactions involve either smoking or food, often with the two mixed together.
Many of the students on the trip who were only casual smokers while in the Netherlands took up smoking in earnest while in Beirut. The students who were smokers before smoked everywhere and much more often. It sort of seemed to go along with being there, and besides, there was so much smoke everywhere that you were breathing it in whether you yourself were actually smoking or not. And it seemed to go with the place. And when people were inevitably late for appointments, it gave those who were waiting something to do. The smokers fit in better than those who didn’t.
