sampa : colin’s blog

I was born in Eastern Europe, but grew up in Canada. Partially because of my background, and also for tourism/business, I’ve visited Europe a decent amount.

I’ve always though Europe was a bit more civilized (in the ways that matter to me) than North America. Take the transit situation; there are only a a half a dozen North American cities that have public transit infrastructures that equals that of the average western European city of even middlin’ (half a million people) size. I just spent a two week working vacation in the Munich area, and as in past visits to Germany, was impressed with how efficiently the U-Bahn (subway) and S-Bahn (suburban trains) cover the transit needs of the area, never mind the availability of high-speed trains to get to other cities.

But I must say, as always I’m completely appalled by the amount of smoking (and general acceptabnce of the practice) in public areas. I was killing an hour in a food court in the Munich airport yesterday, with the kids playing in a kids play area right there, and the air was full of cigarette smoke, to the point that my eyes stung by the time we left. The same story at the departure gate, where smoke from people sitting a ways over drifted onto everyone. When I got to Toronto about eight hours later and pulled down my jacket from the overhead bin, I could still smell cigarette smoke on it. All from hanging around the (necessary) public areas of a big airport. The same story when you go into a coffeeshop, where the air in any non-smoking area is quickly overwhelmed by smoke from a smoking area nearby.

Eastern Europe is of course even worst. After the fall of communism in most of the countries 15 years ago, better/cheaper cigarettes became easier to obtain, and smoking actually had an upswing.

North America was essentially the same about 20-30 years ago, so I guess there’s hope. It’s just hard to figure out how one geographical region progressed (I say that as a non-smoker ), and the other didn’t…