CITY cigarette GULAGs

As clocks tick over at midnight on December 31, 1999, part of our brain is not petrified of alcohol and fireworks stopped looking millisecond, even half the respect for the aircraft to plummet from the sky, to an electrical outlet and does not flicker, and riots to start. Ah, remember the millennium bug?

Six and a half years in a minute, it is expected a similar catastrophe throughout the Melbourne bar scene, as the publicans called "a final cigarette, and awaiting their perceived apocalypse, players will be banished smoking ban enforced by the state government at midnight June 31, 2007, which inevitably leads to empty field.

There has been, of course. Hotel patronage increased by 9 per cent, at least in part because non-smokers can now go out without contracting cancer and the house smells like they spent the evening inside the crematorium.

Another factor was wilyness and creativity of the owners of bars. Over the past two years there was a flurry of brilliant efforts to use loopholes in the legislation, which states that smoking is OK, if there is no roof, wall or cover no more than 75 percent of this space.

Necessity being the mother of invention, the result is a proliferation of beer gardens, balconies, roofs - and the mind, clever, Escher-inspired smoking area.

Smokers (and their friends) find themselves in strange places - Standing In The Rain in graffitied alley next to some of the smoking debris (Bell's sister) sitting on a rickety table, where people brush past you on the way to the toilet outside (Von Haus), under palm (Carlton Hotel), or that it was outside the roadway, sandwiched next to the elevator goods, beer gas cylinders, and a cool room (Comme).

In terms of inventing, a blue ribbon goes Chapel Street Club, Charlie White, who sorted out their smoking by cutting a piece from his corrugated iron roof, you can see the tower of City Hall through the hole, and when the rain, Well, it rains inside the club.

What is interesting is in these ooky, consciously artsy / grunge urban areas for smoking quickly become a normal, acceptable, and in Melbourne Bitching about Sydney. Of course, there is a nice, high-end, smokers' paradise Siglo example, Blue Diamond, Collins and Ms. quarter of Brussels, but the strange corners, balconies and urban lines, which are the cause of the revision bar culture of Melbourne.