By Margaret Ernst

If there’s one thing Malate Atajiri misses about home, it’s the parties.

People dance for hours, until five or six in the morning, laughing and shouting with their friends. Everyone loves to dance in Nigeria, Atajiri says.

They drink, yes. But they don’t like to get drunk.

“I miss that,” says Atajiri. “I can’t wait to go back for it in January.”

Atajiri is one of Bryn Mawr’s many international students who continue to be surprised by America’s college drinking culture. With the drinking age set at 18 in most countries, teenagers worldwide start drinking younger than American teenagers, often in less forbidden contexts. How much people drink and why varies by country, but one word comes up again and again when you talk to international students about drinking in their home countries: mature.

“In Japan you don’t feel that urge to be shit-faced,” says Rei Shimizu, who is from Tokyo.

“French students don’t drink to get drunk,” says Chayma Ben-Hassime, an exchange student from Paris.

Atajiri lives in Nigeria’s capitol city, Abuja, where she attended a Catholic high school. High school and college students in Nigeria often have access to alcoholic drinks, but she says the parties are always about the people who are there, not about drinking.

“Back home, people start drinking pretty early,” says Atajiri. “It’s a very casual thing, drinking.”

In the United States, she’s realized that if a party doesn’t have alcohol, it’s not an interesting one. At parties at Bryn Mawr and Haverford, Atajiri says people regularly drink to get drunk.

She defines “drunk” as throwing up, not being able to stand. If that happens in Nigeria, it’s a really rare case.

“It rarely happens among young people,” says Atajiri. “It’s usually older people who want to drown their sorrows in alcohol.”

Atajiri was shocked when students were going to the hospital on weekends at Bryn Mawr and Haverford because they were sick from drinking.

“I had never heard of alcohol poisoning before,” says Atajiri. “Never.”

There is a paradox in the way people drink in France as opposed to the United States, explains Ben-Hassime. French students drink at bars throughout the week and seem to enjoy the taste of alcohol more then American students, but drink to loosen up, not to pass out.

“It’s not a stereotype—France really does love wine,” she says.

So to Ben-Hassime there’s an odd efficiency to the way American students get drunk on weekends. Party-goers in France may only get to the point of being drunk by four or five in the morning.

“Here, at 11, everyone is drunk,” she says, looking baffled.

Shimizu calls that goal “getting shit-faced." While she loves to drink herself, it took a while for her to adjust from the ubiquitous, slow drinking of Japan to the efficiency of American drinking.

According to Shimizu, drinking is so much a part of Japanese culture that “it doesn’t become something special." She says people grow up drinking with their families and drinking at celebrations. You can even buy alcohol from vending machines.

There is a Japanese term for drinking with your dinner. People do it every day, sometimes getting tipsy, and sometimes not. But Shimizu explains this ubiquity of alchohol leads to an accepting attitude that means Japanese high school and college students rarely associate drinking with rebellion.

Colleen Haley ’10 says her high school peers in Thailand did drink for the sake of getting drunk. Yet because they were seasoned drinkers when she moved to Bangkok at 16, her friends knew their limits.

“People know how to handle their booze,” said Haley.  "You never get to the point when you had hold up someone’s head." 

The drinking age in Thailand is 18, but Haley says kids usually have their first drinks at 12. So by the time they reach high school they’ve “already been through their trashed stage.”

It’s why she says she gets frustrated with college-age students in the U.S. who can’t take care of themselves when they’re drunk. Haley tries never to drink so much that others would have to miss out on partying to take care of her.

But to Antonia Kerle ’11, who lives in London, getting drunk is not just an American obsession.

“There’s something like 150 words for drunk in Britain,” she says, laughing.

Kerle says alcohol is considered a national problem in Britain—particularly binge drinking.

“I would like to say it’s more mature and more sophisticated, but it’s really not,” says Kerle.

Yet Kerle notes a major difference between Brits’ drinking habits and Americans’. Starting at 18, British students will get a drink if they go on a date or want to just hang out.

“The problem with the 21 thing is that it doesn’t promote healthy drinking,” says Kerle. “People don’t learn to just have one glass.”

Atajiri is visibly confused when she talks about the drinking age in the U.S.

At the beginning of her freshmen year, Atajiri walked into the liquor store Wine and Spirits on Lancaster Avenue with a friend. She was shocked when the cashier took one look at her and asked her to wait outside, while her of-age friend bought alcohol.

In Nigeria, she says, “12 year-olds buy alcohol for their parents.”

“I know you guys use miles instead of kilometers and inches instead of centimeters, but you don’t need to be different on every level,” says Atajiri about the drinking age. “You know, join the crowd.”

“I think [Americans] feel limited because of their age,” says Ben-Hassime.

The easiest way for an 18-year-old in the states to get alcohol is from upperclassmen on the weekends, explains Ben-Hassime, not by going to a bar after class on a Monday, or over dinner on a Wednesday, like in France. In her eyes, underage students at Bryn Mawr and Haverford drink excessively on weekends because they know it’s the only time of the week they’re able to do it.

People always have a drink with dinner in Britain, sometimes too many, according to Kerle. But in the United States, students rarely drink in small quantities—“It’s either sober or drunk,” she says.

Shimizu says Japanese people have a different notion of alcohol because they have a different notion of vice than Americans. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are out in the open, because "they happen."

“In a normal bookstore in Japan, you’ll see porn next to comics all the time,” says Shimizu.

Little kids? They just go to the comics.

Related articles

• High School Drinking Cultures
• Letter to the Editor
• Vomiting: an optional part of the holiday tradition
• PLOUT — Students Evaluate Drinking Before, After Lloyd Raid
• Pullout: Traditions and Alcohol
• Reflecting on Alcohol Use in the Bi-Co
• Spec Creates Social Pressure, Drinks
• Wanna Get Away? Well, Don’t Use Alcohol
• Pullout: History of Bi-Co Alcohol Task Force
• Alcohol Policy Songs