My liver hurts. Fresher’s Week (Queen Mary’s version of New Student Week) just ended and the drinking can finally conclude.
It’s strange being in the dorms because my roommates are almost only first years (freshmen — it’s like Harry Potter!) who are starry-eyed and oozing with enthusiasm at being on their own and able to drink. The legal drinking age in England is 18, after all. I don’t want to pull the “back in my day” card, but I feel too old to be drinking until I get miserably intoxicated until 3 a.m. anymore. On Sunday, I cheered at the prospect of not having to drink since I could use class on Monday morning as an excuse.
Not that there’s much to do aside from drink. For the first week, the only student union-organized events aside from orientations and a hideously crowded activities fair were on-campus parties until 2 a.m. at the campus bar, where the drinks were subsidized by the University and cheaper than in most of London. All my school wants me to do is get drunk.
It’s a strange view of drinking from a university. At least at the associate students’ orientation — which consisted of mostly study abroad students — drinking was referred to only as something not to get carried away with. There’s no hour-long skit about how drinking will lead to rape, STDs and eventually death while experiencing your first hangover. And yet, drinking is just as prevalent as in the States, but instead of it happening in a fraternity (which, let’s face it, is a freshman-infested shitshow), it happens at the campus pub (just as freshman-infested and just as shitty). Maybe drinking and coming of age will always be the same when they meet.
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