When I was seven, my mother sent me down to the store to get a bottle of rum. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of these stories where my mom turns out to be an alcoholic. She never had an addictive personality, and neither do I. She used the rum for baking. While it’s an optional ingredient for Gugelhupf, it much improves it.
Austria at the time was relaxed about alcohol. Not only could I buy hard liquor as a seven-year-old, but I could also go to bar with my friends when I was sixteen and have a beer. I’m not entirely sure if that was legal, but at the time nobody even thought to ask if it was. It was similar with smoking. Some of us became habitual smokers in high school, and by the time we graduated, some decided that it was time to quit. At that age, you still can’t legally buy cigarettes in America.
When I lived in Sweden for some time when I was 18, I was waiting for my girlfriend at the train station, when a group of kids only a year or two younger than me approached and asked if I could buy cigarettes for then. They explained that they were too young to buy them themselves. They gave me some money and for the first time in my life, I went to a store and bought a pack. I was later told that I could’ve gotten in serious trouble for this.
I also thought it was unusual that in Sweden, you could only buy light beer in supermarkets. They call this lättöl and its alcohol content is 2.25%. For anything stronger, you have to go to government-run stores called Systembolaget, where you have to show your ID. The reason is that Sweden used to have a serious alcohol problem, which they mostly got under control this way.
Another way Sweden reduces alcohol consumption is by taxing it. It’s so expensive in to buy liquor that whenever someone goes abroad, they bring back a few bottles. When I took a ferry from Stralsund in Germany to Trelleborg in Sweden, I went to the store at the ferry terminal to buy some whiskey to bring as a gift. No luck: All the liquor shelves had been emptied by a group of Swedes who had arrived before me. Another time, I spent a weekend on the Finnish-Swedish border in a town called Haparanda. On Friday evening, a large part of the town migrated across a narrow bridge to the Finnish part of town, where they located one of the many bars offering booze at Finnish and therefore lower prices. At closing time, they stumbled back across the bridge to their Swedish homes.
In England, the culture regarding alcohol is different again. On Friday evenings, a subset of the population gets blind drunk. Until 2006, all pubs had to close at 11pm, and after that time, everyone would stand in front of the closed pub, drunk and not knowing what to do. Fights frequently broke out. I’ve witnessed a lot of them but have fortunately never been part of one. Nowadays, some pubs close later, but there’s still a lot of Friday night drinking.
Nehaveigur 