Alcohol

Alcohol is so cheap in Japan it makes me want to drink more. A large bottle of Smirnoff vodka in Australia costs around 38 dollars. In Japan it costs 11. I can't believe that the rest of the price is tax. Also alcohol is available everywhere. At the supermarket it's in the aisles and you can get it twenty four hours at the convenience store. In fact even vending machines serve up beer, so I imagine it is really easy to acquire alcohol while underage.

This is absinthe. It's illegal to sell in Australia but it comes with a free absinthe spoon here. You may note on the bottle the large number 55, as in percent. They had a higher one at 69, but it was red and absinthe is traditionally green. I wanted the whole aesthetic of smashing my brains out to be perfect.

On the glass is the spoon upon which sits a sugar cube. The absinthe should be poured over the cube allowing a little to dissolve into the liqour. Then two parts ice cold water may be added, turning the green into a cloudy white. Drink, scoff ten more sugar cubes and then go murder someone. The green fairy strikes again.

Absinthe became quite popular after initial reluctance to drink one of the world's most bitter herbal infusions. Wormwood is the ingredient which gives it the distinctive liqourice taste. Herbs added after the distillation give it the green chlorophyll tinge. In nineteenth century France, five o'clock became the green hour, when people retired to bars to sip the increasingly cheap drink.

Unfortunately this price drop was enabled by some shoddy distillation methods, causing the psychoactive chemical thujone to leech from the wormwood and remain in the liquor. More than a few people went mad and some even went on murderous killing sprees. Absinthe was quickly banned, even the well-distilled, thujone-free variants, and most countries continue to forbid it.

My absinthe had little to no thujone in it, so I drank the whole bottle and invoked my super power; my oft mentioned, little used inability to ever get a hangover. I drank about four glasses in an hour and only felt a little jolly. I think if i had four shots of vodka it would have done me worse. The taste and effect were equally disappointing, but the sugar cubes were good. I ate quite a lot of them in between puckering and grimacing over the bitterness. It tastes really bad even for alcohol. Bek declined to join me after the first face pulling.