Smoke gets in your eyes

... and in your hair, and in your clothes, and in your coat, and in your food.

Everyone smokes in Sarajevo. Constantly. In all places, at all times. I sometimes feel like I'm living in an episode of Mad Men, (for those of you unfamiliar, this fabulous Mad Smoke video should explain everything).

Actually, at odds with Sterling Cooper, our office is literally the only place where people don't smoke and I know for a fact that this is only because I work for an international organisation. No doubt the nationals working in the Mission would say the Organisation simply lacks a sense of humour. But this is a policy of the Organisation and not the building: there's smoking on every floor of our tower unoccupied by Organisation I work for. Even the toiletpaper holders in the ladies' room have an ashtray built into the top. Smoking on the loo: now there's a pleasant mental image.

I don't smoke. I've never smoked. I don't even find myself tempted on nights out when all my friends have suddenly revealed their inner social addiction or when I've spent the whole evening outside in a smoking area chatting, because everyone knows its the best place in an Irish pub for flirting. I tried it once or twice but never liked it. I never really got the point (prior to the addiction setting in, at least). But at the same time I'm not particularly anti-smoking. I've got better things to do than give a lecture about suicide to the unsuspecting devotee who has the bad luck to light up alongside me at a bus stop. I don't sigh and cough and insist on changing my seat if someone sitting alongside outside a cafe waves her marlborough around nonchalently. And I am fully aware of the fact that Western Europe is one of the only parts of the world where the majority of people share my aversion to le fag, not to mention having got around to legislating for it. More importantly, I believe quite strongly that now that I've left my own country it's up to me to get on with it and assimilate, and to accept that some things are socially acceptable here rather than elsewhere.

But.

Really I can honestly say - as I struggle to hack up the phlegm clogging my throat - that I have never experienced smoke as dense as I have here. And I've lived and worked in Spain for chrissakes. When I say "dense" smoke I really mean literally that; I had forgotten what it was like to be unable to see the other side of the room through the cloud. BiH is a country where hourly breaks from work to pop out for cigarettes are not just permitted but seen as a basic human necessity. Friends from the hostel who have bussed around the Former Yugoslavia recounted how on 10-hour bus trips (to Belgrade, for example) the coaches generally stop every hour or so. For toilet breaks? I asked. How they smiled at my innocence.

I had forgotten, for example, the hazards of dancing in nightclubs where cigarettes are lit up on the dancefloor and people's wildly waving arms shower all those shorter than them (i.e. me) with sparks. During my week in the hostel, every single item in my suitcase stank of stale tobacco because I unthinkingly tossed a t-shirt onto the top of the case after coming home one night. Passing a beauty parlour the other evening, I saw a girl having a manicure done at a table inside the window, one hand being given over to the beautican while smoke twirled from the other, presumably while she left her nails to dry.

I went out one evening last week and didn't bother to wash my hair the next morning, simply tying it up and running out the door to work. I spent the whole day at my desk sitting in a little invisible cloud of dirty ashtray, following me wherever I went, wafting from my steeping, reeking hair.

Perhaps my favourite is in the restaurants. Silly me, being a little startled by the staff behind the counter making my veliko espresso with a cigarette clamped stubbornly between their lips, putting it down only briefly to come and deliver me my coffee. I wasn't so startled one evening last week, having dinner in a little cave of a restaurant down an alleyway in the Ottoman part of town. We were the only customers and were seated only a few feet from the kitchen door, the entire place comprising no more than a small room. As the door swung open and closed, I could glimpse a professionally-fitted kitchen and the chef wearing regulation apron and whites, furiously puffing as he cooked our food. The kitchen was not full of steam, dear friends, but of smoke. That was something new.

Am I fussy? Am I unnecessarily disturbed by this public health issue? Am I going to turn into one of those people who lectures smokers at bus stops? Hopefully not. But I think I will be importing industrial size bottles of Febreeze when I come back after Christmas.