We Want to Know…Do you have a story about drinking in a foreign country?

by Leah on August 5, 2009

Paris drinkingWe Want to Know…Do you have a story about drinking in a foreign country? Please share…

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Leah August 5, 2009 at 7:13 am

Junior year in Paris: I was bloated from eating too many banana/nutella crepes, lovelorn (see above for bloat, and I didn’t find Frenchmen sexy, with their small, pointy shoes) and I had just gotten a B minus on my paper on Simone de Beauvoir’s THE SECOND SEX–a paper I thought was a masterpiece (hah!) I was about to leave Paris to travel around Europe with a good friend, no money and a Eurail pass…We celebrated our departure at a dark, narrow bar. I drank red wine. Beer. Lots of it. I got belligerent. In America, I was not the belligerent type, but abroad, I was. At one point, the bartender told me (in French–they finally spoke French to me those last weeks in Paris) to calm down. I took a gulp of beer, swished it around my mouth, puffed out my cheeks, and spat in his face. He told me to get the hell out of his bar (and some other stuff I couldn’t understand). And then I saw it–the glittering disco ball above the bar. I couldn’t resist a parting shot. I jumped up and pretended to spike the disco ball (which I pretended was a volleyball). I never saw what happened to the swinging ball, as I was escorted out of the bar–the Ugly American, on her last night in Paris.

Caren August 6, 2009 at 5:43 am

Most of my foreign drinking stories take place in France, where I spent many months studying and working (and drinking) at different times of my life. After my sophomore year in college, i spent a summer studying in the city of Avignon and living with a family. Despite the rigorous french studies, when class let out at 12 each day, my friends and i dropped our books and ran straight to the market to buy lunch before it closed. Along with the simple pleasures of bread, cheese and fruit, we’d buy the cheapest (maybe 3 bucks) local red wine and head to the gardens of the Pope’s palace for our daily picnic. We’d drink straight from the bottle, slowly forgetting about the French semiotics and politics we’d just had to listen to for three hours, growing sillier and giddier in the land of the good life. Once the bottle(s) were empty, we’d play baseball using the bottle as the bat and the cork as the ball. There was studying to be done every afternoon, but mine had to wait until after dinner, once i’d sobered up and had a full stomach. Cheap wine and friends–life was simple back then.

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