Drinking vodka is hard.
Being a Polish person and expected to drink vodka every other weekend is even harder.
I remember fondly the early years of high school, when at the first proper house party, my friend accidentally mixed cranberry vodka with Sprite and it turned out delicious. We drank it all night. Well, not all night, since I had a curfew set for 1am. I had a very good alcohol tolerance for a few years. That was obviously back in the days when my school friends and I weren’t even supposed to be seen with a beer can, yet alone a bottle of 36% flavoured Soplica vodka. Nowadays, I am puzzled by the amount of alcohol I drank in one evening, and that somehow I was never the person who threw up all over the 16-year old and terrified host’s house (everyone knows the struggle of trying to clean up your parent’s apartment after a party they had no knowledge of). What is more, I actively pitied and resented those guests who spent half of the night in the bathroom, head first in the toilet. Until I became one of them. Something happened to my alcohol tolerance, so not only do I not drink vodka because it is the most disgusting thing ever, but also because I just cannot handle it anymore. Not a very helpful thing in my country.
The Poles treat vodka like expensive wine. On your way to a soiree, you buy vodka as a present for the host, who already has an additional five bottles for their guests to drink all night.
This does not apply to house parties alone. For three consecutive years, I spent a week in July at the Open’er Festival in Gdynia (the biggest Polish music event of the year). Every year, it goes as follows:
4pm-6pm: pre-drinks (usually some homemade mixture of vodka and Coca-Cola),
6pm-2:30am: attending 1 out of the 4 gigs that you planned, while you stumble from one stage to the other with a plastic cup full of overpriced, diluted Heineken beer,
3:30am-8am: as watching the sunrise on the cold Sopot beach also requires a drink or two, the beverage of choice is usually some lemon-flavoured vodka mixed with Sprite, which my friend Julia buys. At first I decline, but after hours of small talk with high school friends I never spoke with, and somewhere after a 3rd time one guy comes up to me and asks me my name, I drink the artificially-lemoney vodka like mother’s milk.
If you think that the misery ends here, then you’re wrong. The week after the Open’er Festival is spent at the camping sites on the Hel Peninsula, where there are even more high school friends, and all of them have twice as many bottles of vodka with them.
I can go on.
Last year, a month after the Warsaw Alum from my School in Tricity Engaging in Drinking (WASTED) Convention, the European University Debating Championships (EUDC) were held in my home city. For some reason, and my fellow debaters will agree, vodka goes great with British Parliamentary debating. For the last night (what we call the Championship Dinner) the Org Comm manage to secure unlimited amounts of Żubrówka vodka. The Polish of course emerge unscathed from the events of the night, what cannot be said for everyone. A few foreigners end up in hospital and a group of Israeli debaters are overheard discussing the taste of “this peculiar wine” — their state of health is not known.
To top of the summer season, my birthday is in September. Last year, this meant 3 consecutive weekends spent drinking. The harms of this were as follows:
3 (three) days of lying in bed and trying to recover;
2 (two) friendships made awkward by drunk, clumsy, and barely remembered snogging;
1 (one) person having to face the shamefulness of this — me.
Therefore, by mid-September, I decided to stop doing this to myself. I quit vodka altogether and worked hard on forgetting the smell and taste. What I focused on is finding a way to attend social gatherings with a genuine smile of appreciation on my face — not the queasy, anxious feeling you get at 1am, as the party is at full swing, which makes you want to just order a cab and recover at home. At 20, I wanted to learn how to stay up all night, dance to all the songs, and be able to hold an interesting conversation. Discovering this all was quite enlightening (#namaste) and I am quite thankful to myself for cutting out the 40%. To me, it reinvented the whole social experience, and most importantly, it simply made me a more content person.
Nevertheless, for some reason, people tend to be very surprised that I no longer agree to drink vodka. To them it just doesn’t make sense! I am young and I have the obligation to drink lots and enjoy it. My patient explanations that the outcome of what they are proposing is going to be me throwing up on them are not enough to assure them that I am perfectly fine without a shot glass in my hand. Of course, what I’m discussing here is not an essay on the marvels of abstinence and I am not arguing that “I can party while sober” — because no, I cannot. What I am saying is that a good craft beer recommended to me by one of my friends is enough to keep me occupied throughout the night. Especially if it’s an IPA. So please don’t force shot glasses into my hand, because I’m definitely not trading my beer for some basic vodka.
