i guess it could be easier to become drunk at home, as you're in your comfort zone and you don't have the worry of staggering home and possibly getting attacked, as you're home already.

alcohol is a downer, making someone feeling low even lower when they've drunk some. so if they drink a lot, no wonder they're feeling under the weather (and not just from a hangover. )
having lived with an alcoholic, i've seen first-hand how it can change your mood if you're drinking casually and constantly while at home.

i live in a city with a university, so the town center is either full of drunken teens/20-somethings, or drunken football fans. there's very few nice pubs near me, just sticky floored icky pubs, or clubs/bars. you get glared at by chavs/bouncers, asked for I.D, not allowed on for wearing the wrong shoes, a high possability of getting robbed, and come home stinking of cigerette smoke. lovely.
now that many places don't close until 3am, we now get people staggering home drunkenly at 4 or 5am instead of 1-3am.

i tend to go to the student union bar with my freinds after my martial arts lesson, where we relax after getting pummeled for two hours. it's normally quiet there and we normally get the non-smoking room all to ourselves. it's pretty nice. ^^ we don't drink to get drunk either, just a glass of whatever we like.

I'm such a downer when it comes to drinking. I try stuff, but no matter the alcohol % i still taste only the alcohal and it makes me sick. When i was in the air force people drank all the time at home on the weekends, mostly because we were mechanics and got screwed working 12-14 hours every day and weekends, so drinking was the only way for most to forget about work. The pubs didnt exist in north carolina, only clubs. here in my town in new england theres plenty of pubs, but they are dying out. usually older people go there to have a dirnk and hang out, which is nice, but it seems like more and more people are just leaving the town so the pub thing is slowly dying.

I try to drink, but i cant. only got drunk once and i'de like to say its enough for me, but it sucked because i was the only one drunk at the time. i cant find a single alcoholic drink that doesnt make me get sick.

For the Sweden vs. England example, a major factor may well be Sweden on average being a colder climate, as well as darker in winter due to being further north. Since alcohol is a depressant, it also reduces the body's sensation of cold, so has some greater (dubious) benefits for those in Sweden than those in England.

Since I'm English, I come from a pub culture. While I was at uni (Durham), if I remember correctly there were 17 bars provided by the university alone, where all drinks were decidedly cheaper than the competition in town pubs, of which there were several, with varying degrees of pleasantness and atmosphere. Not being someone who drinks alcohol, however, I generally only went to the bars/pubs with friends, usually after (or in some cases during) various society meetings.

"alcohol is a downer, making someone feeling low even lower when they've drunk some."

This statement does not hold in general. Yes, alcohol is a depressant, but that doesn't necessarily mean it makes you emotionally depressed, rather that it dulls the senses and makes you feel drowsy. Yes, it can make you feel miserable, but in my experience that mainly happens if the drinker was in a bad mood already; alcohol can just as easily cheer someone up, make them angry or induce just about any other emotion you care to name. Note that alcoholism is a special case: most people who drink alcohol aren't alcoholics, so alcoholics can't be used as an epitome of drinkers in general.

That aside, most everything else Becca says about drinking in Britain is true. Britain is renowned for having one of the worst drinking cultures in the entirety of Europe. Most people, IMO, are alright, even the ones for whom it's a case of getting as drunk as possible as fast as possible and preferably as cheap as possible (although that last one can be very hard to do in pubs and clubs) - i.e almost everyone in Britain between the ages of 13 and somewhere in the mid 20s. ;P Sure, they can screw up a night on occasion but for the most part all they do is make a tit out of themselves in the end (and for some that's all part of the fun). The problem are people like hooligans and violent drunks, the people who take advantage of other drunk people and the people that just plain don't know what they're doing - in other words, the small minority of twats who screw it up for everyone else.

One of the nice things about Cambridge is that since it's only really a city by virtue of the fact it has a university, you get a lot less of the problem types compared to the big cities. There are also a hell of a lot of nice, friendly, clean, non-tacky pubs to be enjoyed. Great place to live.

Although as for the cigarette smoke thing, all I can say is roll on July. Smokefree Britain ftw.

In America it all depends where you live. Mostly I get drunk at friend's houses because that's the cheapest option and where I go to university is too small of a town to have bars/clubs. Now that I'm in Washington DC I mostly drink in bars/clubs because they are everywhere and alcohol is expensive everywhere so why not go out?

I hope they don't ban smoking in bars and pubs. It pissed me off from a financial aspect when they banned it at restaurants in Dallas, because it hurt my tips as a waitress (waitresses only make $2.13 an hour on the payroll, people). This mess about banning it everywhere absolutely kills me. If you don't want to be around it don't stand near it. If you don't want to be around it at a pub/bar/club then go to clubs that choose privately to ban smoking. You're probably more likely to die from being fat, eating bbq'd food, using your microwave, being hit by a car, car accidents, giving yourself brain cancer with cell phones, a bad fall or natural causes and your genetics than you are from being in a 20 foot vicinity from second hand smoke. I think the "I don't like the smell/I have asthma" excuse is pretty bogus too.

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This statement does not hold in general. Yes, alcohol is a depressant, but that doesn't necessarily mean it makes you emotionally depressed, rather that it dulls the senses and makes you feel drowsy. Yes, it can make you feel miserable, but in my experience that mainly happens if the drinker was in a bad mood already; alcohol can just as easily cheer someone up, make them angry or induce just about any other emotion you care to name.

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meh, you misunderstood me.
i never said it made you depressed, i just said it can lower your mood further if it's already low. i read some research somewhere that it can act as a downer on many people, just wish i knew where so i can quote it as i suck on remebering quotes correctly.

i know already that alcoholics and people who just drink alcohol are different. i was just using it as an example of the more extreme side of drinking at home.

in the us even tho its agenst the law some teens drink ether to drown there sorrows thar felling depressed ir to impress people i on the otherhand just like the taste of differnt alchohol *i dont like aprocot brandy yuck too sweet and it burnd ALL the way down

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waitresses only make $2.13 an hour

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Crud! Emigrate to Britain, girl! I got 5.35 an hour as a waitress with no previous expericance over here. I spose it depends on how old you are though.

They seem to drink a lot here in north wales, but it doesn't seem much of a social problem where I live. Pubs seems to always have people in them most of the day; people genrally don't rush to gulp down alcohol. There's a pub just a couple of houses up the road from where I live, and though it's often quite full we don't very often get trouble or too much noise. It's a mix of ages that go to our pub, perhaps because there's few other places to go.

When I was at uni we'd buy drinks cheaply at the supermarket, and usually be drunk before going out! And then there were the house parties where everyone brought a bottle or whole pack of beers. Having people passed out in the loos was some what of a routine. I drank a _lot_ at uni, but I don't always go quite so mad thesedays.

in the us even tho its agenst the law some teens drink ether to drown there sorrows thar felling depressed ir to impress people i on the otherhand just like the taste of differnt alchohol *i dont like aprocot brandy yuck too sweet and it burnd ALL the way down

I take it you had something to drink before you wrote that?

*swat* no, SMM always seems to post like that.

but in comparison, i'm currently posting under the influence of an entire bottle of wine and my spelling isn't much more worse then usual. ^^

My drinking habit: I don't.

Thanks for sharing that with us.

I don't drink at bars, since I'm terrified of the prospect of having to drive home even MILDLY inebriated when closing time hits. I drink where I can crash: so at home or at a friend's house.

Is there a difference between for instance US (California for example.) and Swedish drinking habits??

PinkBlaise3k, what does uni really mean?

i ONLY drink at home, that way i dont get arrested

And yet your profile says you're 27?

Uni is short for university, Fred.

ROTFL. that was jawsome.