My First Drink
If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you might have picked up that I have some proficiency with alcoholic beverages. At one time, my shot vocabulary was more impressive that what I knew about geometry. (The ingredients for a surfer on acid? Yes. Which is one is the isosceles triangle? No.)
And while this might come as quite a surprise, it wasn’t always this way. I didn’t drink in high school – as in ever, at all.
I was terrified of getting in trouble and convinced that drinking would destroy my chances at going to a good college, but I decided that my senior trip to Europe would be a great time to have that long-awaited first drink. (College applications were done, and it was Europe. The legal trouble aspect was gone.)
Since I was in Italy, you’d think my logical choice would be wine. Even without wine, you’d think I’d go for a beer, but after having a sip of beer at 13, I decided that it was one of the most foul-tasting liquids I had ever put in my body and wanted nothing to do with it. (Nothing to do with it until I was a sophomore in college that is, but bygones.)
Surrounded by all the choices in the world at an Irish bar in Italy (I might have already been starting off on the wrong foot, but I think it was close to our hotel), I ordered a margarita.
“A margarita?” the bartender said.
“Yeah, a margarita.” I’d seen my parents order them enough, and it seemed like a perfectly lovely choice for me.
Of course, there were two major problems with this plan:
- No one in Italy does girly drinks. Traveling abroad, especially in the country of the world’s finest wines, is not the time to order a Midori Sour or Peach Schnappes unless you also want to wear a large neon sign that says “Ignorant American” with an arrow pointing at your head.
- There is no ice in Europe. Ice is kind of important when it comes to a margarita. “Frozen” or “on the rocks,” you’re going to need ice.
Giving me yet another of her confused/disgusted looks, the bartender pulled a martini glass off the shelf, filled it nearly to the rim with straight tequila and squeezed a lime in it.
Not knowing much better, and not wanting to seem like a wimp on my first drinking excursion, I took a swig.
If I thought beer was foul before, I had an entirely new standard.
Still, I couldn’t give up, and I had to keep going with my “margarita.”
I made it through one and a half drinks. (Yes, I was stupid enough to order another one.)
That’s when a friend of mine who knew the potential disaster of what I was actually drinking too my glass away from me.
“You’d have to be very tipsy to want more of that,” he said.
This was more than fine with me because by now, I was feeling very giggly and really needed to use the restroom. A couple girlfriends and I walked back to our hotel, and I was asleep soon after.
When I did have my first real margarita as a freshman in college, I figured the difference in drinks was just another cultural difference – like berets to baseball caps.
It took one re-telling of the story of my first drink in Italy, to a friend whose family was from Italy, for me to realize how innocent (nice word?) I had been. And that maybe picking up a guide book or two wouldn’t have been a terrible choice before heading abroad.
Either way, I can’t say that I recommend straight tequila for the inexperienced drinker. It might not improve your street cred, but a Midori Sour is a lot easier to choke down.
* Obviously, the margarita pictured looks nothing like what I ended up with in Europe.