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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2638 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 27, 2024

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The ubiquitous availability of beer

Say more? Only been to Germany once for short weekend in Berlin years ago. Have seen comfortable attitudes to alcohol in Europe (wine with meals France and Italy, small beer at 9am on a sunny day in France, gorgeous and strange beers in Belgium). Wondering what the situation is in Germany. I love beer but I hate drunks, and attitudes with and towards drink is off the charts in places like UK where the objective seems way more about getting pissed than actually enjoying oneself maturely.

Lego Land, Play Mobil Fun Park, the local trampoline park all serving beer in the food court / canteen. Most museum cafes too. Unlike the USA when you do find beer at these sorts of places it will be something mass market and expensive for a .33 l can, here it tends to be something local and cheap in a .5 l bottle.

The UK is just a very poor and depressing place outside of London and its extended suburbs (the South East) and a few other pockets (and the wealthy countryside, but very few people live there anymore). Drink is one of the only things they have. In Germany wealth is more distributed and outside the former DDR there are many good jobs supporting functioning and prosperous communities.

When I visited the UK I stayed in a little hamlet in Gloucestershire, about halfway between Bristol and Gloucester. I visited Bristol, Bath, Gloucester, Cardiff, and Salisbury. None of these places (with the exception of a particular section of Bristol) struck me as “depressingly poor”, although that might just be because I wasn’t living there everyday, or because things that seemed “quaint” to me were actually just signs of poverty. I’m sure things in the Midlands and up North are probably worse, but at least in the parts of the UK I saw, not much depressed me except for the demographics in Cardiff and the piss-poor adaptation of The Magic Flute I saw in Bristol. Maybe I just haven’t seen the high life in London so I don’t know what to compare things to.

Bath is probably not a great example as it is high-net worth. Cardiff, you need to look around a bit. It at one point was considered the drug capital of Wales, so you don't really have to look far.

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