Social Doesn't Mean Healthy

One of the things to do while living in Turkey is to buy a water pipe (hookah). They call them "nargile" here. On any row of restaurants you'll be able to see a Nargile place that advertises itself as such where people congregate to have a few drinks and take a few puffs off of a lightly adorned piece of glass. The light tobacco you smoke out (sheesha) of it is flavored anywhere from peach to cotton candy. Since we still can't talk to anyone here in their native language, we've decided we'd better do something that makes us feel Turkish so BAM! we got a nargile.

Doing so was a simultaneously delightful and painful process. It was great going from place to place to haggle for pipes, seeing the same styles repeated, but never quite the same. What was difficult, however, was coming to consensus on what to get since Mel and I had staunchly different views on what a nargile should look like. After several weekends of looking an bargaining we finally rested on a high quality deep blue that we got for a really good price.

I enjoy the thing. The guy that sold it to us provided us with both cappuccino and strawberry flavors. Mmm! The problem is that this is an altogether unhealthy habit. It was two years ago that I made a New Year's resolution to not even socially smoke cigarettes anymore (you know, when you've been drinking and your judgement isn't what it should be). I've faithfully kept to this. According to the World Health organization, smoking out of a water pipe for the hour that the substance usually burns for can equal 100 or more cigarettes! NHS has something sightly different to say about it, which can be summed up here. I was taught to smoke a cigar by only puffing into the mouth, not inhaling into the lungs. This doesn't really work with a water pipe. It takes a significant breath to draw enough smoke down into the vessel so the tiny little puffs I use hardly get any of that fruity or coffee-like taste onto my buds. We only break the nargile out bi-weekly or even less, but I wonder how well this fits into my plans of dying healthy. I'll post a picture of my lungs a little later.