Anti-tobacco, get stuffed. Smoking is cool.

Today we went out for a meal courtesy of my lovely in-laws. We went to one of our favorite place in Leeds, the Sahara. For for £7 you get turkey platter piled 6 inches high with lamb and couscous. Awesome. It is a delicious restaurant and also a 24-hour sheesha bar. Sheesha is a tobacco/fruit mash that you smoke out of these massive hookahs (like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland). It is tasty and immensely relaxing to have a sheesha and recline on the dumpy sofas and listen to Arabic music. They also serve a delicious mint tea.

However, because of the current tobacco paranoia (funded largely by pharmaceutical companies who sell very expensive nicotine patches) the UK is going to have a tobacco ban starting in July. That means that a whole industry of sheesha bars in going to be shut down in a Nazi-style clamp down. That is lame, really lame. The sheesha bar was a sort of weekend safe haven for normal folks in Leeds. Downtown Leeds is a scary place on weekends, the best comparison I've heard was my lecturer who compared it to the opening seen from Space Odyssey: 2001, when all the apes are smashing each other up with rocks and bones. Anyways, prohibition sucks. I am beginning to seriously worry that things like milkshakes and cheeseburgers might soon be contraband. I have no desire to live forever (at least not in this body), so public health should leave me alone dagsnabbit!

Hooray for prisons

My German friends in the flat above us were a bit depressed this weekend. For the second time in three days their car was broken into in front of our house. The person broke in by pulling at the top of the door and pushing at the middle of the door with their boot. The result is a significantly screwed up door. They had just gotten it fixed, and the exact same thing happened again. The boneheads didn't even bother to steal anything the second time. The first time they simply stole her umbrella and then threw it into our neighbours' garden two doors down.

This is a big bummer for them. She's had to leave her car at her sister's house on the other side of the city because she is tired of getting it fixed. It's a pretty big difference from what I'm used to in Canada. I remember one day at my last flat I came home and there was a car on fire underneath my bedroom window. My other neighbour also had his car set on fire a couple years ago in front of his house. I can't remember if I already blogged about it, but we had to move from our last flat because the alcoholic psycho lady next door kept threatening to kill us, and was always trying to break through our wall into our flat (we shared a wall with her, yippee!). We had to sneakily move out because we were afraid our landlord would steal our stuff, he had once moved somebody out of their flat without telling them. Crazy.

Anyhoo, off to work now at the veggie cafe. Peace!