Katie O’Donnell: On the humble Scottish night out

After three very dry weeks in Morocco, we made our first trip to the pub this weekend. As great as it turned out to be, it served as a reminder of two very important aspects of life: 1)The ban on smoking indoors is the best thing to come out of the EU. 2) You cannae top a Scottish night out.

The anarchy starts with the pres, a classic example of the nation’s binge-drinking problem and arguably the best part of any night out. You play a few rounds of Ring of Fire (complete with dirty pint tinged toxic-orange by the ever-present addition of Irn Bru), take a ton of photos (before everyone’s too wrecked to hold their faces still), and join in a rousing rendition of Loch Lomond/nostalgic Basshunter/The Steak Pie Song before staggering down the path in your highly impractical shoes to the unfortunate taxi driver who’s drawn the night shift.

However, aside from the Irn Bru and Runrig, Scottish pres are pretty much the same as any others in the world. It’s the rest of the night that’s drastically different. Going back to those shoes, a night out in any of Scotland’s cities is an excuse to get ridiculously dressed up. I’m talking all of the make-up, false eyelashes, your best dress, fake tan if that’s your thing. No matter what you wear, there will be a Dundee lassie who’s more “done up” than you. This couldn’t be further from my study abroad nights, where jeans and t-shirts were the dress code du jour.

Then there are the Scottish taxi drivers. Their banter is the best in the world. They put up with endless make-up touch ups in their rear-view mirror, turn a blind eye to the swigs you’re taking from a smuggled plastic bottle and turn the radio up when a TUNE comes on, all the while keeping up the great chat. You just can’t have the same experience with a Darija-speaking Moroccan driver, especially as you don’t want to distract him from the road he wasn’t watching anyway.

After the sobering cold of the evening, you need another drink to get you in the mood for jumping up and down in a room of sweaty strangers. In much of the world, drinking in clubs is prohibitively expensive, but in Scotland you’ll find the poor student’s salvation: the £1 drink. The cause of, and solution to, many a problem, fuel for dancing to music you’ve actually heard of (none of this ringtone-esque Eurodance) and recipe for a night you’ll never remember. After the cheesy tunes comes the need for cheesy chips, and luckily drunk food is yet another of Scotland’s greatest achievements. Forget the generic doner and chips; Scotland has vending machines that sell Scotch pies and fudge doughnuts. Here in Morocco, we had to resort to leftover tagine and harcha from our host family’s fridge. Now if that’s not a valuable cultural experience then I don’t know what is.