Heming-way or the High Way

"Honey, did you close the garage door? I don't remember if I closed the garage door"

"Too much work, and no vacation,
Deserves at least a small libation."
Oscar Wilde

Aaaaaah...nothing quite like kicking your heels up and enjoying a hard earned drink. Yup, there's a lot of kinds of drinking out there - to forget, to remember, to remember to forget - but nothing quite beats knowing that you don't have work tomorrow, that you didn't have work yesterday and that all you gotta do is relax.

That is of course until you wake up hungover at 4am, rousted from your bed by a wake up call you wish you hadn't requested, and stumble out into the dawn in order to go see some touristy crap you immediately regret signing up for.  You could be hiking in the hills, biking down a volcano, checking out an ancient temple - for that first hour, all you want to do is hit snooze. There's an art to drinking on vacation. It's one we all learn to master only after a good deal of trial and error.

In my experience, the best way to avoid the problem is of course just not drinking at all the night before a big day out. "But it's vacation bro," your compatriots might say. "Just have a couple and we'll be good to go." Famous last words. Unless you're sticking to your tried and true favorites, you really don't know what you're getting yourself into.  For instance, when visiting Galle a few weeks ago, I had a couple of beers with dinner.  Literally two beers. For the next week, I felt awful - apparently Lion Lager is made with some kind of aggressive Asian yeast that attacks your small intestine after finishing off the sugars in your alcohol. In Peru, failure to order your drinks "sin hielo," or "without ice" to you gringos, meant that you were about to dance with the devil in the pale fluorescent light (of a bathroom). As soon as those delicious little cubes of cold finished chilling out your mojito, they would turn your insides into a war zone. Amazingly though, after three shots of Vietnamese rice whiskey that was cured with a scorpion, a snake and a crow in it, I felt fantastic.

Actual picture of what I drank

At the end of the day, foreign booze is really no different than any other strange thing you'll experience when you're abroad.  Half the fun of traveling is trying crazy new drinks or new types of animal meat. There isn't a whole lot you can do to prevent an adventurous repast from turning into a 5 day course of cipro and an embarrassing week at the office.  It's a foreign country with foreign food and foreign drink, and your body doesn't always know what hit it. Just try to avoid doing it before a long day away from bathrooms.

 ~

A brief aside to my awesome readers - thanks to everyone who has been following along with my adventures so far! I've been at this for just over a month now and so far we've gotten over 3500 page views, which as far as I'm concerned is a ridiculous triumph. The positive feedback has been incredible and a great motivator to keep up my awkwardness abroad. I will be hitting the road this week in order to do some traveling around the countryside, so internet access will be severely limited - hence, no posts for a couple days. Fear not, as I'll be collecting up all sorts of stupid tales of my idiocy to share with you when I get back!