Canadians like their drink

I have managed to consume at least one beer every night since I have been here. Last night I had three and a half. Went on a pub crawl with the GSS (Graduate Student Society). Unfortunately it was poorly organized thanks to the fact that the person leading us did not do the scheduling and was not much of a drinker and thus had not been to any of the pubs.

We were supposed to hit three pubs, but after the second one our leaders left us to go join the club crawl. Me and two other guys left to go home. But while we were waiting for a bus another group from the pub crawl came by looking for another pub. They asked us to join them so we did and we wandered around in on Broadway in Kitsilano until we found the Copper Tank. There we got pitchers for every three people and hung out. After that we got CA$1 slices of pizza and waited for the bus to get back. But the bus was taking too long so we just split a taxi. All in all the night was fun.

Because of all of this drinking I have learned about the laws here. First, two forms of ID are required to drink. If you look under 25. One piece of ID must be government issued and have your birth date, name, photo, and signature on it. The second piece must have your name and a photo or signature. A common set of IDs is your driver's license and a credit card.

In terms of purchasing liquor, it's all provincially controlled. They have BC Liquor Stores here and they close at 21:00. This is like Washington and there state-run liquor stores.

As for the pubs, they all close by 1:30. The truly odd thing about the pubs, though, is that they must close their patios by 23:00. Where that came from I don't know. I guess it helps keep pubs from getting so loud as to bug the neighbors.

And the drinking age here is 19. Apparently it is up to the province to set the drinking age and they all have it set to either 18 or 19. It actually alternates going west to east on what the age limit is: BC is 19, Alberta is 18, Saskatchewan is 19, etc.

I suspect that, if anything, I will come out of my PhD experience being more of a beer drinker than when I entered.