Published April 29th, 2007
Some things are the same the entire world over for young people. They need the company of friends to hang out with and to experiment and swap stories. If I were here in Spain during my early years I would have been subjected to the Franco regime. That probably would not have been an awful lot of fun for me. Having said that, my upbringing was somewhat conservative. It was idyllic, being on a semi-tropical island, but it was a quiet and a very safe period in my life.
Fast forward to today’s Spain and compare with the years prior to 1975, the year of the death of Generalissimo Franco, “El Caudillo”. Young people were subject to strict curfew, and courtships were conducted in the home with “la abuela”, the grandmother, sat over in the corner to keep things from getting too hot.
Now, we have young girls leaving home at 1 am to go to the disco, where they will remain, supposedly until 7am, without supervision. These clubs open at such an ungodly hour, some of them seven days a week. Who on earth are their customers? Some will be night workers who finish work in restaurants around midnight as bartenders, waiters and chefs, etc. What about all those other patrons, who are they, these night people?. As most of us sleep there is a whole other world pulsating and throbbing to its own timetable and routine.
The country finds itself in the grip of a new phenomenon that is partly driven by young people who simply want to get together and party, but it is also fuelled by a determined streak of civil disobedience. The street and park bottle party is outlawed, therefore it is exactly the thing today’s youth want to do. As my son puts it, “if we can’t do something that we would really like to do, then we want to do it even more, to the point of obsession.”
The main problem with the Bring Your Own Bottle party is few of the participants have a plan of what to do after the party. The idea is to meet up in some location with a large enough space to park lots of cars, then open up the boots and those become instant bars. The car’s all have to have pumped-up super sound systems and that leads to competing mini discos.
Just outside Valencia city in the area of Paterna, is Herón City, a large sprawling leisure centre. The car park has been hijacked by the Botellón every Saturday night where serious drinking to “get-wasted” goes on. The law forbids holding these bottle parties in the street, but as the car park is private property the police are prevented from going in and breaking it up in the absence of complaints. Perhaps they do not even have the will to do so as it would probably mean a riot would break out and the police would have to hurt a lot of otherwise good-natured kids in the process.
The management of Herón City are faced with a difficult decision: On the one hand they make no money from such events. In fact the mess is left for them to clean up. However, these kids do most probably patronize the movie theatres and bars and restaurants when they are not doing the Saturday night thing, so the management seem to be prepared to turn a blind eye.
I have a great concern as to what happens when it’s all over. Presumably the car owner moves from the boot of the car to the driver’s seat, and in a full state of intoxication he or she drives home. Perhaps they think that they have put the car on auto-pilot and that will keep them, and everyone else safe. Well, it doesn’t work like that!
I can only hope that there are police checkpoints to test for alcohol levels as those young people are leaving the private space and entering the public road. I may be Scrooge-like in hoping that cars and licenses get taken away from offenders who have to then attend driver’s re-education classes, but one sure way to pump up the death rate on our roads is to ignore what is going on and let the kids have their fatal fun. They can still have their Botellón on Herón City property if that is allowed, they simply have to arrange for someone to drive who is sober enough to do so.
If I were young again I confess that the scene would have great appeal. I most probably would be a regular, and I probably would have the biggest, baddest sound system on the lot. But I also hope that I would have the commonsense not to drink myself, or if I did that I had a geeky non-drinking mate with a drivers license who I could trust to get me and my car home without a scratch.
That’s if I were young again. Instead I have a Volvo and a mortgage and I’m in bed before the bewitching hour lest I turn into a pumpkin.
Drive, Drink, Drugs, equals Suicide
Some things are the same the entire world over for young people. They need the company of friends to hang out with and to experiment and swap stories. If I were here in Spain during my early years I would have been subjected to the Franco regime. That probably would not have been an awful lot of fun for me. Having said that, my upbringing was somewhat conservative. It was idyllic, being on a semi-tropical island, but it was a quiet and a very safe period in my life.
Fast forward to today’s Spain and compare with the years prior to 1975, the year of the death of Generalissimo Franco, “El Caudillo”. Young people were subject to strict curfew, and courtships were conducted in the home with “la abuela”, the grandmother, sat over in the corner to keep things from getting too hot.
Now, we have young girls leaving home at 1 am to go to the disco, where they will remain, supposedly until 7am, without supervision. These clubs open at such an ungodly hour, some of them seven days a week. Who on earth are their customers? Some will be night workers who finish work in restaurants around midnight as bartenders, waiters and chefs, etc. What about all those other patrons, who are they, these night people?. As most of us sleep there is a whole other world pulsating and throbbing to its own timetable and routine.
The country finds itself in the grip of a new phenomenon that is partly driven by young people who simply want to get together and party, but it is also fuelled by a determined streak of civil disobedience. The street and park bottle party is outlawed, therefore it is exactly the thing today’s youth want to do. As my son puts it, “if we can’t do something that we would really like to do, then we want to do it even more, to the point of obsession.”
The main problem with the Bring Your Own Bottle party is few of the participants have a plan of what to do after the party. The idea is to meet up in some location with a large enough space to park lots of cars, then open up the boots and those become instant bars. The car’s all have to have pumped-up super sound systems and that leads to competing mini discos.
Just outside Valencia city in the area of Paterna, is Herón City, a large sprawling leisure centre. The car park has been hijacked by the Botellón every Saturday night where serious drinking to “get-wasted” goes on. The law forbids holding these bottle parties in the street, but as the car park is private property the police are prevented from going in and breaking it up in the absence of complaints. Perhaps they do not even have the will to do so as it would probably mean a riot would break out and the police would have to hurt a lot of otherwise good-natured kids in the process.
The management of Herón City are faced with a difficult decision: On the one hand they make no money from such events. In fact the mess is left for them to clean up. However, these kids do most probably patronize the movie theatres and bars and restaurants when they are not doing the Saturday night thing, so the management seem to be prepared to turn a blind eye.
I have a great concern as to what happens when it’s all over. Presumably the car owner moves from the boot of the car to the driver’s seat, and in a full state of intoxication he or she drives home. Perhaps they think that they have put the car on auto-pilot and that will keep them, and everyone else safe. Well, it doesn’t work like that!
I can only hope that there are police checkpoints to test for alcohol levels as those young people are leaving the private space and entering the public road. I may be Scrooge-like in hoping that cars and licenses get taken away from offenders who have to then attend driver’s re-education classes, but one sure way to pump up the death rate on our roads is to ignore what is going on and let the kids have their fatal fun. They can still have their Botellón on Herón City property if that is allowed, they simply have to arrange for someone to drive who is sober enough to do so.
If I were young again I confess that the scene would have great appeal. I most probably would be a regular, and I probably would have the biggest, baddest sound system on the lot. But I also hope that I would have the commonsense not to drink myself, or if I did that I had a geeky non-drinking mate with a drivers license who I could trust to get me and my car home without a scratch.
That’s if I were young again. Instead I have a Volvo and a mortgage and I’m in bed before the bewitching hour lest I turn into a pumpkin.
Drive, Drink, Drugs, equals Suicide
Copyright (c) 2007 Eugene Carmichael
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