HOOKAH SMOKE ON THE WATER
BLOORCOURT VILLAGE -- Jerome Klassen knows the score. The 27-year-old,
bespectacled York University political science Ph.D.-hopeful spent
his summer in Lebanon volunteering with Palestinian refugee camps.
Now he's a weekly regular at the Beirut Palace and House of Wraps
on Bloor near Dovercourt, a hookah bar
where Jerome where he handles a hookah with ease.
"I got introduced to this stuff in Lebanon. Everybody smokes
it down there," he says. "It's really relaxing and it
tastes great." Klassen shuffles a puck of coal around the tinfoil-covered
bowl. "I've never smoked cigarettes, but for some reason, I
can handle the taste of this tobacco. I can't really handle cigarette
smoke."
A typical hookah stands about one and a half feet tall with a water-filled
glass chamber as its base and ornately styled brass making up the
cylindrical body. It's basically a big water bong: you wrap your
lips around the mouthpiece of a rubber hose and suck smoke first
into the chamber and then into your lungs. It's a lot more fun than
cigarettes. The taste is damn fine, too. Beirut Palace carries three
different types of tobacco in three
different flavours that patrons can smoke from hookas,
all of it imported from Lebanon, with fruit shavings mixed in by
owner Karim Sabra.
One bowl costs $8 to $10 and takes nearly an hour to smoke on the
shaded patio. Palace patrons while away sunny afternoons beneath
the blue roof and yellow parasols, lush ivies twisting from pots
hanging overhead, handmade brass and glass hookahs
filling with thick, creamy smoke on the ground by their feet.
Sabra brought all 25 of his hookahs and many accessory
items over from Lebanon. A shy man of few words, his face crackles
with pride when he speaks of his prized piece: a mammoth, double-hosed
shisha pipe that holds two litres of water and sits on a mantle
behind the bar. You can just picture the row of rinky-dink potheads
sipping their $2.75 beers and staring forlornly over the bar at
last call. "It's the most expensive hookah
in all of Canada," Sabra says with a wink. PAUL CARLUCCI
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