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The Wednesday 2007-12-05 at 10:08 -0000, Fergus Wilde wrote:
The rate of boozing does seem to be higher in the Netherlands. It's
higher even than in the UK, though it did start out a lot lower.
Booze is very much cheaper in Spain and Italy than in either the Netherlands
or the UK, and there public drunkenness is generally frowned on and binge
drinking is relatively rare, despite being far less regulated. The key is
that wine is seen as part of a meal and part of your nutrition, not classed
as a drug with a capital 'D' and fussed over to the point where it acquires
too high a social value.
That was correct; it is changing.
My pet theory is that it's the weather - generally awful here in the UK and in
the Netherlands, generally far, far pleasanter in the Mediterranean. You may
well feel like a nice cold beer on a sunny day, but you're far more likely to
lock yourself in with a bottle of whisky when it goes dark at three thirty in
the afternoon as it will here today :-(
Young people now want drinks with high alcoholic content, which are quite
expensive if bought at a discotheque or equivalent dancing music bar, which
were the favourite places for the young to go; some times these places use
"faked" distilled beverages ("garrafón"), bad quality and maybe dangerous
(methylated?).
The result over the years was that young people changed to buy the drinks
by the bottle in supermarkets, and made their own drinking parties
("botellón") in parks and streets till "early" hours, to the desperation
of the neighbors (very noisy during the night, dirty streets later, plus
damaged property).
Customs change... this kind of public drinking, specially by the very
young, its becoming, no, has become, a bad problem here, too. The
regulations are getting closer to what they have "up north".
- --
Cheers,
Carlos E. R.
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