What do you look for in a foreign experience? The ultimate casbah? Anyone who understands your tortured Spanish? The guy who pulls you out on the dance floor and makes you dance to bouzouki music?
Why do some trips work while others can’t end fast enough? Is it weather? The possibility of terrorism, heroism, or regular old tourism? All are factors.
But we also must consider booze. Each country has its cocktail; each tour its tipple. Arriving at legal age can be as useful as updating your passport. It allows you to bond with people by doing what they do: drink.
Alcohol can be addictive for some, but not for me. (Then again, I don’t bond with strangers over exotic pastries, because I don’t understand the concept of “a little dessert.” There isn’t enough chocolate in Belgium or whipped cream in Vienna.) But when it comes to booze, I practice what used to be called social drinking, maybe 2 1/2 drinks on my wildest night. In foreign lands, they’ve added to the experience.
An incomplete list
of memorable moments
A mojito at El Floridita in Havana 10 years ago, when the Soviet Union had withdrawn its money and Cubans were living through what was euphemistically called a Special Period in a Time of Peace. All the deprivations of war, without the explosions. There was nothing to eat. Even a bottle of water was hard to come by. Communism didn’t seem to be turning anyone’s crank – in fact, one old man told us, “I love Zhohn Elway, Zhorzh Boosh, Ronald Reagan. Capitalismo!”
El Floridita, a pre-Fidel Hemingway haunt, was nothing but a tourist trap, and we wanted to ignore it. On the other hand, we were so thirsty. Mojitos had yet to invade the States, and we had never tasted anything so tropically elegant. I had 2 1/2, followed by a really good idea for a novel involving a bullfighter. Every mojito since has brought it back.
New Year’s Eve at the Embassy Suites in Birmingham, Ala., with free booze and fried items for families with kids. We were planning to cocoon in king-size beds, but the scene in the atrium was too good to pass up. A Southern rock band played the kinds of oldies we were just old enough to appreciate. Kids rode up and down the glass elevators. Orthodox Jews from a rehearsal dinner stayed to party with guys in seed caps who talked like Jimmy Carter. The drink in question was a Budweiser long-
neck, the snack was a jalapeño popper.
Vinho verde during the harvest season in Northern Portugal. The landscape was thick with grapes; they hung down around our faces when we walked the ancient Roman roads. Then it began to rain, and we ended up in the medieval town of Amarante, with nothing to do but visit ham shops, which are tiny cavelike restaurants whose ceilings are hung with grape vines and … ham. There’s no menu. The waitress brings what looks like a shaving mug of green, slightly carbonated wine made from just-picked grapes. And a small plate of … ham. This doesn’t sound rollicking to you? All I can say is, try it some time.
A gin and tonic anywhere in the Hamptons. The smell of a gin and tonic in the Hamptons. Ralph Lauren should bottle it.
Stag’s Leap petite syrah in Napa, where I had gone on assignment for Food and Wine magazine without knowing the slightest thing about food. Or wine. “Oh, no big deal,” said the PR person assigned to my case. “Just say one of these two things: I’m getting a sort of cherry-berry, cherry-berry thing, and what’s going on in the mid-palate? And slosh the wine around in your glass. It makes you look important.” Before long, a sort of happy-sappy, sappy-happy thing was going in my mental mid-palate.
Cheap champagne at Club Maeva in Tulum, Mexico, an all-inclusive resort where you had to be a joiner. You could run from the after-dinner, line-
dancing party, but you couldn’t hide. Happy organizers were constantly badgering us, in German accents, to participate. “What?” some Wolfgang or other asked us, “you’re not going to zee champagne explosion?” He herded us off to the pool, where we floundered around for a while with the other ugly Americans until suddenly a hundred champagne bottles were decorked and poured – all over our bodies.
“Oh, my God!” yelled my husband, “this is what it must be like to win the Super Bowl!”
At home, we tried it with seltzer and a baby pool, but it wasn’t the same.
A vacation is a rare thing made just a bit sparklier by a light buzz. I say, drink it in.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
