A while back I said in a post there were a few things I wanted to talk about before we left South America.\u00a0 One of them is smoking.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a big fan of smoking.\u00a0 I know a lot of people that smoke.\u00a0 My Dad used to smoke.\u00a0 He quit a long time ago.\u00a0 My Grandfather used to smoke, I think my Grandmother did, too, but I can\u2019t remember.\u00a0 My father-in-law smoked.\u00a0 It killed him.<\/p>\n

Smoking kills you.\u00a0 We all know that, right?\u00a0 So if you\u2019re smoking, you should stop.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I remember flying from New York to Fairbanks (and vice versa) on a Pan Am 747 .\u00a0 It was when smoking used to be allowed on planes.\u00a0 I hated that.\u00a0 I remember going to the Golstream Cinemas when there was just two theaters and smoking was allowed.\u00a0 I hated that, too.\u00a0 Besides my little\u00a0commentary\u00a0here, I don\u2019t give smoking a lot of thought.<\/p>\n

I certainly didn\u2019t give smoking a lot of thought in South America, that is until we got to Chile.\u00a0 I don\u2019t really remember anybody smoking in Colombia or Ecuador.\u00a0 There must have been some.\u00a0 I just don\u2019t remember.\u00a0 I do remember that almost no one smoked in Peru.\u00a0 I thought that was interesting.\u00a0 I thought maybe it had something to do with the altitude, of the cost of living.\u00a0 Then we got to Chile.<\/p>\n

In Arica, the northernmost Chilean town, a lot of people smoked.\u00a0 I was such a change from 25 miles to the north.\u00a0 It was a little shocking.\u00a0 Especially seeing 14 year girls in school uniforms smoking.\u00a0 It was a little strange.<\/p>\n

There was a lot of nothing in northern Chile, including people, so there wasn\u2019t much smoking going on.\u00a0 Then we got to Santiago. Wow. EVERYONE smoked.\u00a0 I mean EVERYONE.\u00a0 There was one time we were driving down a street through a medical college that was on both sides of the street.\u00a0 The two lanes of traffic in the street were divided by a green strip in the middle, with benches and trees and such.\u00a0 It was some sort of break time, and there were like a thousand or so students on both sides of the street and in the middle smoking.\u00a0 The air was hazy with smoke, like a really smokey bar.\u00a0 It would just pour in the windows of the van.\u00a0 It was unbelievable.<\/p>\n

It was like this regularly in Chile, tons of people in public places smoking like crazy.\u00a0 If you have stock in tobacco companies, have no fear.\u00a0 You\u2019ll be doing fine.\u00a0 Michelle and I went out for a date to a Jazz club while we were in Santiago.\u00a0 There were four No Fumar signs on the door.\u00a0 We walked in and it was pretty smoky.\u00a0 This turned out to be because they had a smoking room, with no ventilation.\u00a0 At one point, all 20 people in the bar, including the musicians and bartenders, were all crammed in the little room smoking.<\/p>\n

Now this is not intended to be some rant on smoking.\u00a0 I just cannot describe the\u00a0amount\u00a0of smoking that goes on in Chile.\u00a0 You would not\u00a0believe\u00a0it.\u00a0 And I though it worth mentioning.\u00a0 Oh yeah, don\u2019t forget, smoking kills you, so stop.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back I said in a post there were a few things I wanted to talk about before we left South America.\u00a0 One of them is smoking.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a big fan of smoking.\u00a0 I know a lot of people that smoke.\u00a0 My Dad used to smoke.\u00a0 He quit a long time ago.\u00a0 My… Continue reading From Mark: Smoking<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[329,265,217],"tags":[352,351],"class_list":["post-2122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alaska-to-patagonia","category-chile","category-peru","tag-bolivia","tag-chile","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2122"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2124,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions\/2124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebluevan.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}