Lighting Up

It is strange to be in a place where smoking is so common. In the US and in HK, smoking has been relegated to a personal activity, with most signs of its once public place obliterated. It is rarer and rarer to see an ashtray in a restaurant. Even rarer is the restaurant with no segregation of its smoking and non customers. In Portugal, this would be the norm, and while from appearances I am not sure that there are significantly more numbers of Portuguese that smoke compared to the US population, they are not outcasts.

I have seen a man, cigarette limp, check into the Marriott. I have seen a woman descending the escalator into the subway station, hair curled with age and intention, take a prolonged drag, and with a flick of the wrist, abandon the lit end on the passing stair step.

Said woman on staircase going into the Subway.

And, it is not as if the Portuguese are not aware of the dangers of smoking. I don’t think many people are anymore, but it certainly seems like Portuguese packaging leaves nothing to the fine print or the imagination. Consider this discarded package from the beach in Nazare:

Roughly translated, the package reads cigarettes kill.