Erasmus strategies for buying cheap alcohol

One of the problems of being an Erasmus student is that you are drunk every night. This of course is a problem because it means you have to buy alcohol every day - it's a fixed item of your daily To Do List.

And since alcohol is not free, you come up with the craziest ideas to spare some money on it. Erasmus students, when it comes to sparing some cash on the booze can be very creative. At one point or another, me and my friends tried one of these schemes (I'm not making this up):

1. Buy all your booze in advance, in the supermarket. Carry it around with you in a backpack. Some of my friends actually had ice cubes in the backpacks to keep the beers cold.
2. Buy pure, 95% alcohol. It's cheaper by the liter.
3. Buy €0,80 wine from the carton. Mix with Coca-Cola.
4. Buy 0,5 L cans of "unbranded" beer for €0,90. They taste like shit, but you drink them at near freezing temperatures.
5. Enter the nightclub. Ask to leave the nightclub, supposedly to "check on your bike". Find previously hidden drinks in a bush. Drink. Return to nightclub.

Now, I'm from Portugal and my friend Antoine is from France and we had a problem: we wanted to pay little, like everyone else, but we wanted wine. Finding cheap wine was easy. But cheap wine you could drink, was not. But we had a secret:

6. Buy wine in bulk, directly on the seller.

Antoine found, just near his house, there was a wine business, a kind of enoteca and a very good one, actually. And they sold wine...in bulk!

The wine was stored in big, 1500L cylinders and you could buy as much wine as you wanted. In Italy this is called Vino Sfuso and it can be quite good, especially the white wine. In our case we drank a kind of chardonay made in Piemonte. And boy, was it cheap! Cheaper than anything in the supermarket. A miracle happened: further proof that God loves drunks and protects them.

There was the small problem of the weight of the bottles. I'd never carried 10L of wine on my back before. And I don't think I ever will again.

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