Turkey Part 3 - Smokers

It was our first day at Le Jardin. Arriving in the early afternoon, we had settled into our room and then made the most of the remainder of the day to swim in the sea and the pools, and to generally get the lay of the land. Then it was time for dinner.

After surveying the amazing variety of options and filling our plates, we found a table in the huge dining room and sat down to enjoy our meals. Then we were hit by that unmistakable stench that absolutely ruins a nice meal: cigarette smoke!

I was shocked to see the people at the next table smoking away while we and others around us were eating. Then I realized that there was an ashtray on our table, and more on adjacent tables. Every table in the room had an ashtray, and I noticed smokers at some other tables as well. For me, the enjoyment of that first meal was definitely dampened by the wretched smoke wafting around us.

At the moment we went in for our first meal we were not aware that there was another, equally large, dining area for nonsmokers. As we left dinner, we spoke with an employee who told us where the smoking and nonsmoking areas were.

For our other meals, we used the nonsmoking area as often as we could. Unfortunately, they usually did not open it for the first hour of breakfast, so if we were early, as we usually were, we had to deal with the smoking area. We would try to find a table close to the open windows and hope that no smokers would crowd us.

The smoking room had all the windows removed so that air could move through the room, but this didn’t really help keep the smoke away from you unless you were sitting by the windows and had the air blowing in, not out.

The nonsmoking room, on the other hand, had almost no open windows. They seemed to believe that the air conditioning was sufficient to reduce the heat and humidity and make it comfortable. But it usually wasn’t. Sometimes it was just a bit too hot to sit comfortably in that room. So we were often faced with a choice: deal with cigarette smoke or with the heat.

Smokers affected us in other ways as well. Normally, we kept our room air-conditioned and the balcony door closed. While this made the room nominally cooler, it did make the air a little stale after some time, so occasionally we wanted to have the door open for a while, particularly first thing in the morning.

But on either side of us, we usually had smokers, and sometimes they would be on their balconies at the same time that we wanted to open the door. The result, of course, was having their noxious smoke waft into our room from time to time.

And the same sort of thing happened a few times when we were relaxing on lounge chairs in what we called “the garden.” It wasn’t frequent, but even a bit of that stench blowing your way can bring you down. And there were many times when walking around the place, I would get a nose full of someone’s secondhand smoke. I hated that!

I Just Don’t Get It

To me, cigarette smoking is one of the most disgusting things a human being can do. I truly do not understand why people would want to poison themselves with something that smells so obnoxiously bad, makes their hair and clothes stink, blackens their teeth (and lungs), and has such a negative effect on people around them.

I have a few acquaintances who smoke, and while I like them very much (they wouldn’t be in my circle if they were not good people), I have never been able to understand why they need to pursue that habit. One thing I must say about the few people in my circle who do smoke: they understand that nonsmokers generally dislike it, and I appreciate their efforts to keep it from affecting me when we are together.

But the majority of smokers don’t seem to give a damn about anyone else, and it is this attitude that makes me feel so negative toward them. Now, I am not perfect, and I have my weaknesses too. To some extent, I’ve probably had something of a food addiction for the past decade or so, where food becomes a kind of sedative or relaxant to make you feel better.

But that affects only me; I don’t generally throw food at other people. Cigarette smoke, on the other hand, DOES affect other people in the vicinity of the smoker: by breathing it out with impunity, it’s like “throwing” a gross-smelling, cancer-causing poison at other people. But, as I said, most smokers could not care less about how their behavior affects others.

For the most part, Ukrainians, like Russians, are heavy smokers. It is almost impossible to walk the streets of Kharkiv without having someone’s putrid smoke make it’s way into your nose. To Ukraine’s credit, smoking has been banned in restaurants and other public buildings, and things are improving here. But for a committed antismoker like me, it’s still a little tough sometimes.

With so many Russians (and Ukrainians) at the resort, I wasn’t surprised at the amount of smoking going on. And I fully expected that smoking would be pretty much uncontrolled in Turkey. But I was a bit surprised at how much of it was done by other nationalities. In a number of cases, there were parents raising a cloud of smoke with their poor children right next to them, having no choice but to suck in their parents' odious fumes.

I knew that the French have had a long tradition of poisoning themselves with cigarettes, but I sort of thought that they would have come more into the modern age and smoking would be on the way out.  Silly me! Very often, the heaviest smokers were French. Germans didn’t seem to smoke as much as the French or Russians, but there were a few.

It’s Just My Chance to Rant

Lest it seem as though the air at Le Jardin was just a cloud of cigarette smoke, I have to say that it wasn’t that bad. Most of the time, the air was clear and clean with sea breezes and such. But the occasional issue with smokers, while not a major problem, was one of the few small drawbacks of our time at the resort.

This has just given me a reason to rant about smoking in general. It’s something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time. And now I’ve gotten that off my chest, so I can move on to more positive impressions – next time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------