Shisha.

[Wyatt Earp]

This.



Is it me, or is a minor shisha trend developing in parts of London? I've seen shisha at a couple of barbecues, and now a pub round our way offers it in their beer garden.

[diggedy derek]

Shisha.

Aren't there some really bangin' shisha bars in Edgware Road? You can smoke a pipe and look at babes and hunks on wide screen plasma TVs, or something.

Not only are pubs near your way now offering shisha gardens and the like, but one Lebanese place near the tube north of you built a terrace for smoking shisha pipes when the smoking ban came in.

[Moonlight Shadow]

Shisha.

Good fun, the owner of my "local" in Geneva is Tunisian so he has had it on offer for a while. Relaxing stuff.

[Incandenza]

Shisha.

Is this the same thing as a hookah?

There was a brief hookah craze in LA a while back, with bars offering them. There have long been two hookah bars in Westwood, and they are as popular as always.

[Jimmy Bignutz]

Shisha.

Yeah, Edgware Road's got tons of 'em. You know they've fallen foul of the smoking ban? So even though a lot of these places are purely for the purpose of smoking these pipes, the customers all have to sit outside.

It's political correctness gone mad, Stew.

[Wyatt Earp]

Shisha.

Hookah's the Hindi/Urdu word for it, apparently. In Turkish I know it's nargile (first time I tried it was in Istanbul).

[WOM]

Shisha.

Not Constantinople?

[linus]

Shisha.

I think shisha is the egyptian term, nargile/argile in the levant and hookah further east.

[ad hoc]

Shisha.

It's become popular here too. There are cafes opened which have the nargile/shisha as their selling point.

I never got into it until I was in the West Bank, when a lot of people smoked it in the evenings in cafes and so on. Some of the tobacco mixes were really good.

On the name: Wikipedia agrees with linus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookah) but I think it is wrong on Palestine where it is called Nargila not Shisha - though things might be different in Gaza since that's more Egypt leaning.

In Uzbekistan (it says there) it's called Chillim, which is intriguing as that (or Chillum) was a method of smoking dope as I recall from those days. Not that it looked anything like a shisha, but more like a clay cone.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Shisha.

It's very hard to find an indoor shisha cafe in Dubai now, as the Department of Health here has research which shows that an hour on the pipe is equivalent to smoking 60 tabs, so it's banned on public health grounds.

I'm all for preserving a bit of local culture, particularly in Dubai as this place is a culture vacuum, but the stuff mings - especially the fruit blends. I mean - apple tobacco? Eat a fucking apple if you like the tase of apple. And get that shit away from me, it gives you cancer.

[Ibn Pickthall]

Shisha.

It's got lots of names, including hubbly bubly which is th eonly common one I haven't seen on this thread yet. It also gets called shisha in the Levant area, at least in Syria and Jordan. I was never into smoking and even less enamoured by shisha; I can't bring myself to be around it, passive shisha smoking gives me an enormous headache.

[Wyatt Earp]

Shisha.

Rhing Dobie wrote:

It's very hard to find an indoor shisha cafe in Dubai now, as the Department of Health here has research which shows that an hour on the pipe is equivalent to smoking 60 tabs, so it's banned on public health grounds.

That must be quite recent; I was sucking on the old grape shisha indoors in Dubai city 18 months ago, washed down with a gorgeous lime and mint "virgin cocktail".

I quite like shisha, actually. I don't really, really like it, but that's mainly because I'm not used to it. I think I could properly get into it.

[Guest]

Shisha.

Rhing Dobie wrote:

It's very hard to find an indoor shisha cafe in Dubai now, as the Department of Health here has research which shows that an hour on the pipe is equivalent to smoking 60 tabs, so it's banned on public health grounds.

I'm all for preserving a bit of local culture, particularly in Dubai as this place is a culture vacuum, but the stuff mings - especially the fruit blends. I mean - apple tobacco? Eat a fucking apple if you like the tase of apple. And get that shit away from me, it gives you cancer.

1 tab = 1 fag?

[Gangster Octopus]

Shisha.

Why on Earth... wrote:

This.

The page cannot be found?

[Wyatt Earp]

Shisha.

It could a month ago.

[Gangster Octopus]

Shisha.

Yeah, just noticed the date...

[Crusoe]

Shisha.

Has nobody in south-west Devon thought of opening one called Plymouth Nargile? What a wasted opportunity.

[Jimmy Bignutz]

Shisha.

Not sure if anyone from the Middle East has ever been to Plymouth, to be honest.

[Reed John]

Shisha.

There is/was a place in Arlington (VA) that had those. It seemed to attract exactly the sort of hipster douchebags you'd expect from the combination of smoking + Arlington + something that sort of looks like pot + something not indigenous to the USA.

[Incandenza]

Shisha.

Yeah, I've only smoked a hookah once and didn't like it at all. I hate cigarettes, and adding some flavor to smoke plus sucking off the same pipe as everyone else didn't make it any more pleasant.