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GROWING UP OVER A GLASS OF BEER
How drinking with friends helped spur my social education //PATRICK DE OLIVEIRA
I was 15 years old when I had my first glass of beer in a bar. This was in Brazil, where I grew up. I walked in with three friends — who were all about that age — and asked one of the waiters for a table.
"Can I see your IDs?" he asked.
"Uhh ... we forgot them," we awkwardly replied.
He looked down at us with a sly smile and then looked around the bar. He pointed us to a table toward the back of the room. "Just be discreet," he said.
Though the drinking age in Brazil is 18, it is not uncommon for people underage to be served at certain establishments. Most nightclubs won't show any leniency, but many bars do.
The environment at this place was of a traditional Brazilian buteco, drinking establishments that are sketchy by American standards. Plastic tables and chairs were spread throughout the room and waiters ran around with large bottles of beer and small, barely washed glasses. Butecos de copo sujo, or "dirty glass bars," are a staple in Belo Horizonte.
my hometown in Brazil. The city is located inland, and its unofficial city motto is "Se não tem mar, vamos pro bar," which translates into "If there's no ocean, let's go to the bar" (minus the nifty rhyme).
So, when I was 15 I did what any 15-year-old was supposed to do: I got initiated into the city's bar culture.
After we all sat down the waiter came up to the table and asked what beer we wanted. We ordered the cheapest one, and a few minutes later he came back with a large bottle of beer and four small glasses. He filled them to the rim and placed the bottle into a bright yellow plastic koozie. My friends and I looked at one another, and the oldest one — our beer expert — raised his glass.
The clacking of glasses filled the air before we could say cheers.
"If you don't toast before drinking, it's seven years without sex," he said.
The conversation flowed smoothly as the beer hit our mouths. At one point, as I was midsentence, I looked down and noticed that my
glass was empty. One of the guys sitting next to me grabbed the beer bottle and promptly refilled it. I smiled at him without missing a beat in the discussion.
We had spent a couple of hours in this buteco and had probably drunk four bottles when we decided to leave. We asked the waiter for the check.
"Oh no," he said. "You can't leave without a saidéra."
In Brazil you should always order one more bottle of beer, the saideira, after your supposed last one. The problem is that once you do that, you may end up drinking more than one saideira. We stayed a little longer and drank a couple more beers.
I remember leaving the bar tips and proud of my first drinking experience. I felt like I had grown up — that I had become a man. Of course, that was not the case, but that night was my first step in beginning an education, both in drinking and in a quaint form of social life.
As time went by I started going to more and
Social saidelaire. The cultural attitude toward alcohol in Brazil, where Patrick De Olivaure(furthest right) grew up, is much different than in the U.S. Patrick had his first drink in public when he was 15, but, the "goal" of drinking in Brazil was never to get drunk but to socialize, converse and, ultimately, solidify friendships.
Contributed photo
more buteos with my friends. We would sit down order our first beer, toast and start chatting. The conversation could go anywhere from girls to sports to philosophy. We say in Brazil that one shouldn't discuss religion, politics or soccer. Well we did. As each beer arrived the topics would get increasingly controversial. We'd start off by talking about the newest telenovela actress on the cover of Playboy and end.up debating the morality of the death penalty.
By the time I was a senior in high school joining my friends at a bar had become a tradition We would go at least once a week, mostly on the weekends. But we also went after school, and sometimes even cut class to talk over some ice cold beer. I'd say that some of those conversations gave me a better education than I would've ever gotten inside the classroom.
The objective never was to get drunk. Not ooze in the three years after I entered that first shady bar did I throw up or black out because of drinking. The first time that actually happened was at a going-away party thrown by my Brazilian friends right before I came to Kansas. It was a night of mixed feelings — I was excited and sad to be leaving — and it was one of the very few times I have used alcohol to deal with emotions. I woke up the next morning not exactly regretting what had happened, but realizing getting drunk didn't change anything.
In Brazil, getting wasted doesn't earn you a badge of honor. You will rarely find people bragging about how they blacked out the previous night And, growing up, alcohol was never an "exotic" substance — something that could become a fetish. Binge drinking, that nihilistic urge to drink just to get drunk, never took a hold of me.
Instead, those first experiences gave me the image of alcohol as a kind of social glue. For me the ideal drinking experience is not one where I go up to the bar and order individual drinks throughout the night. What I really enjoy is grabbing a table with a group of friends, ordering a large bottle of beer and making that initial toast As we talk to and over one another, someone will notice another person's empty glass, grab the bottle at the center of the table, and fill it up for him or her — a discreet sign of camaraderie Then, when we decide it is time to leave, we realize that we still need to order that last bottle, which means extending the pleasure of conversation. By the time we've figured out how to split the check hours upon hours have gone by — time spent with the kind of idle talk that mortars the bricks that sustain long-lasting friendships. Jp
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