BORDERS UP! (By Jason Rohloff)
Just a quick post today, my contribution to the HSM Book Club. A journalist by the name of Vitali Vitaliev wrote a book about ten years ago called “Borders Up!: Eastern Europe Through the Bottom of a Glass”. In his book Vitaliev drinks his way through Eastern Europe, recounting stories from his youth and the drinking culture he grew up in during communist rule. It’s a desperate tale, at one point he tells of a friend who drank nail polish remover in an effort to get drunk. The postscript is that he actually gives up alcohol at the end of his trip.
If you’re interested in glimpsing an excessive drinking culture beyond our own this is well worth a read, his comments about Australians at Octoberfest are particularly amusing, as is his optimism about there always being another eighteen drops in the bottom of an empty vodka bottle.



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