Barhopping and blacking out: Confessions of a Luxembourgish teen

I went to a very small international school in Luxembourg, with about 70 people in a grade. My mother is a teacher at the school, so I attended for free, but I felt out of place among my classmates, who were largely the children of businesspeople and bankers. Luxembourg frequently tops the charts for the highest GDP per capita, and there was certainly a lot of money around: you could feel it. The popular girls in my grade were long-legged Scandinavian volleyball players swathed in designer clothes; the boys played soccer and had expensive, carefully-crafted haircuts.

There was also a lot of alcohol. Everyone could drink from sophomore year onward – the drinking age in Luxembourg is 16. As soon as one person in the grade turned 16, they could buy alcohol for the rest of us, and so the beginning of my sophomore year was just one string of house parties, one every weekend for the first two and a half months of school. I first got drunk at a house party, and fourteen-year-old Anna felt profoundly changed and deeply grown-up. Honestly, at the time, getting drunk for the first time was a bigger deal to me than my first kiss would be, exactly a month later (also at a house party). Most of us started going out to bars and clubs in town later during sophomore year, as more and more people had their sixteenth birthdays and became legal drinkers.

My birthday is in October, so I wasn’t legal on my first night out in Luxembourg, a tiny and largely inconsequential European capital city, but one that seemed vast and suggestive to my fifteen-year-old self. I drank two beers, two vodka red bulls, and two tequila shots. My two friends and I moved from one bar to the next, meeting and greeting dozens of familiar faces (constant run-ins are inevitable in such a small country). I couldn’t stop giggling: it was unbelievable that I was being allowed to do this.

At the end of the night, we helped each other onto Luxembourg’s wonderful public buses that come like clockwork, and we stumbled back to our houses, where we drunkenly fiddled with our keys and slipped into bed before the buzz wore off. Most of the following nights out, I stayed at my best friend’s house, because she lived near town and we could walk back. Luxembourg is a very safe little city. I’ve done that walk a thousand times – barefoot through the parks, carrying my heels, tipsily chasing ducks across the grass.

It seemed glamorous and grown-up at the time, and most of my American-based friends shake their heads in disbelief when they compare my teenage bar-hopping with their furtive house parties. We were just kids, though, kids in what we thought was a huge playground. Money played into it: there were girls who would buy a 1500 euro table at one of the most exclusive clubs every weekend, splitting the cost three ways between them. My peers rented out fancy clubs for extravagant birthday parties – I felt like a queen as I descended from the VIP section in a tight black dress and heels, clutching a glass of Veuve Cliquot champagne.

Very Important People in the VIP section

Looking back, the reality was incalculably far from glamorous. The bar where we spent a lot of our time was pretty grotty, with red walls and sticky tables where we played drinking games and coughed as we blew smoke in each other’s faces (I was still sad when it closed down: I feel like I grew up in that bar). I remember swooping in and paying three euros for a wasted friend’s tequila shot when a guy bargained to buy her a drink in exchange for a kiss. My (ex) friends and I had several drunk fights on the street, mascara tears dripping down our faces as we slung slurred words at each other.

Gossip spread like wildfire in such a small school, and whatever happened on Friday night would be all over the school by Monday morning, whether that was pictures of a girl’s dress riding up as she made out with a guy on a couch, or stories about girls losing their virginities with multiple boys in club bathrooms. Several people were hospitalized for drinking over the course of that year, me among them, and there’s nothing less glamorous than sitting in your living room answering questions from policemen about your underage drinking.

Back in Luxembourg, representing Princeton

I went back to Luxembourg last summer, after my freshman year at Princeton (where I’m still not legally able to drink), and I went out again with some of the same friends. The sticky red bar had closed down; we lamented its passing. We drank in a circle on the grass in the park, and then we went to the same sequence of bars and clubs as we had before. Over the course of the night, I noticed a lot of fourteen- and fifteen-year olds, flipping their hair and checking their phones and flirting with the bartenders for shots. They looked like me – or at least, a high school version of me, cute and tipsy and eager to please. The highlight of my night was gulping water in my kitchen with my best friend after we took the night bus home.

The whole experience was intensely depressing and slightly bittersweet. I realized, all at once, that I had outgrown suffocating little Luxembourg and my crazy, misguided teenage years. But it was also liberating: now that all those tequila shots in dirty little booths were behind me, I was free to become someone new – free to find a better way to spend my Friday nights.