Smoking at Weddings
When opening the door to the wedding banquet midway through dinner, I was soon washed over with smoke. After standing for a few moments inside that smoke filled room, my eyes soon started stinging. After just a short while inside those wedding banquets, my clothes smelled like smoke. It’s truly appalling how much people smoke at weddings and how much people smoke in general in China.
While running on a somewhat hazy (meaning polluted) day in Shanghai, I was coughing as I ran by people smoking before 7am! It says on the package in English (and presumably Chinese, as well), ‘Smoking Causes Disease and Death.’ That’s pretty blatant. If I read that everytime I picked up a pack of Oreos, even though I know transfats can cause disease and as a result death, I think I would seriously stop eating Oreos. But yet that extremely bold warning has had seemingly no effect on the smoking population of China. Although, I haven’t done the research on it, it wouldn’t surprise me if China was the largest cigarette market in the world, followed closely by the US and Indonesia.
I just have to be glad there is no smoking allowed on public transportation. Although eating and peeing do seemed to be allowed on public transportation… Go figure…
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You’re right, China is the biggest cigarette market in the world. There was a fascinating article in the Globe and Mail (my favourite newspaper) last year about the Chinese government’s monopoly on tobacco. I can’t find the article online, but here is an excerpt:
“This is the bizarre parallel universe of China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly, the world’s most successful cigarette-marketing agency,” The Globe and Mail reported. “If you believe the Web site of the tobacco monopoly, cigarettes are a kind of miracle drug: solving your health problems, helping your lifestyle, strengthening the equality of women, and even eliminating loneliness and depression.”