a rooskie in dublin

Rounds!

by Irina Kuksova

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If you come from a country that has no tradition of drinking rounds, you will be amazed at the amount of drinks the Irish are ready to offer to your lucky self on a night out. Go to a pub with an Irish crowd and after you give up trying to understand their accent, check how many drinks are in front of you. Yes, a lot more than one, and these are all yours to drink. I know, I know. You have barely touched your very first drink but that's the trick. Everyone else around you has already finished theirs.

So it's time for you to get up and save their dry mouths. To get a round, as the Irish call it. The drinks in front of you are not favours. They are a token for the drinks you are bound to get other people.

In Russia when it comes to drinking in bars, its usually "every man for himself." Meaning, everybody is responsible for getting their own drink. Okay, women are only responsible for themselves if they're on a girls night out. (It's not a matter of financial inequality. We just don't want chivalry to die.)

You can say: "Hey but I saw a Russian gang in a pub and there was this huge guy who paid for all the drinks. Wasn't that the round system in operation?"

Hmmm. Most likely, NO. A few possible explanations for what you saw are:

He was just trying to show off.

It was his birthday.

He was the boss on a night out with employees.

Plus, if you continued watching that group, you'd probably have noticed that nobody moved to repeat the same generous gesture. People continued getting their own drinks at their own pace. This is not an instance of massive stinginess. It's just proof that for Russians, rounds are not on.

Most Russian women would only have one drink a night anyway. Or two in exceptional circumstances, say during a long dance session in a night club.Two is enough to get us quite tipsy. The motto "Women are not supposed to eat, much less drink," has generated plenty of Russian top models. This is why rounds make no sense in a group of Russian women. We are likely to be stuck on the first round till dawn.