Sweet summer child, you should have seen Europe at the turn of the century.
I’ve seen doctors pulling out a cigarette and start smoking in the middle of a ward. Any place you’d go at night - a cafe, a bar, a pub, a disco - and you’d nearly vomit at how your clothes smelled the next day.
The US used to be a lot like this too. Food service workers smoking cigarettes while they carve meat and then throwing the butts in the drain. Smoking sections in restaurants being most of the restaurant while the non-smoking section was a corner of the restaurant where they just sat you between all the smokers like the smoke was gonna hit an invisible barrier. Everybody was smoking all the time. My grandma once served my grandfather his breakfast in an ash tray because she was so sick of him putting out his ciagrettes on the plates.
It wasn’t until around the 2000s that things really shifted in the US, and now the thought of a smoking vs non-smoking section of anything other than a little room at the airport where the smokers all squash into to smoke is unheard of.
I remember a buffet place—it may have been a Golden Corral, not sure—that had a sealed off smoking section with a glass wall, one of those “air doors” above the sliding door that function like an air lock, and a separate AC system.
It was always weird to look into that space and watch the lonely people smoking and eating.
Every other restaurant was a smoking free-for-all.
Sweet summer child, you should have seen Europe at the turn of the century.
I’ve seen doctors pulling out a cigarette and start smoking in the middle of a ward. Any place you’d go at night - a cafe, a bar, a pub, a disco - and you’d nearly vomit at how your clothes smelled the next day.
Everything and everyone smelled like tobacco.
Nowadays? It’s paradise I tell you.
The US used to be a lot like this too. Food service workers smoking cigarettes while they carve meat and then throwing the butts in the drain. Smoking sections in restaurants being most of the restaurant while the non-smoking section was a corner of the restaurant where they just sat you between all the smokers like the smoke was gonna hit an invisible barrier. Everybody was smoking all the time. My grandma once served my grandfather his breakfast in an ash tray because she was so sick of him putting out his ciagrettes on the plates.
It wasn’t until around the 2000s that things really shifted in the US, and now the thought of a smoking vs non-smoking section of anything other than a little room at the airport where the smokers all squash into to smoke is unheard of.
I remember a buffet place—it may have been a Golden Corral, not sure—that had a sealed off smoking section with a glass wall, one of those “air doors” above the sliding door that function like an air lock, and a separate AC system.
It was always weird to look into that space and watch the lonely people smoking and eating.
Every other restaurant was a smoking free-for-all.
Ha, this is an excellent story