Smoking culture isn’t discouraged here like it is in my own country, America.  The high schoolers do it, the old men, the university students, the salary men, the fashionistas… 33% of the country is lighting up.  All walks of life.  Cigarettes are dirt cheap.

Unlike America, health care is provided for pretty much everyone (the country successfully implemented this in only 12 years time, 1977-1989).  The out-of-pocket payments for medical care and medicine are almost as cheap as the cigarettes.  It continuously baffles me that a mostly pre-industrial country that was completely ravaged by war could build itself up to be one of the world’s top economies within 50 years or so, provide universal health care for all of its citizens, and yet my own country, the world’s #1 economy, cannot do the same for its own people.