Work Hard, Play Hard

Maybe I've been a little harsh in my portrayal of the schedule of a medical student. Sure, the work is copious and difficult, but we do get a fair bit of time off as well, and being experts at efficient time management, we have learnt to cram in as much relaxing as possible into the evenings and weekends. Throughout the university world we are generally renowned for our zealous drinking regimes, rarely missing an excuse to get completely battered. In the first year, on the night after a deadline day, we went to the Student Union in droves and drank ourselves into the ground. We had just spent 2 months writing essays on alcohol abuse.
Our sports teams like to kick back too, the rugby team are probably the most voracious drinkers with nudity, urine and incomprehensible swearing playing an important role in their weekly rituals. It's so bad, in fact, that the Uni has tried to enforce compulsory "non-alcoholic socials" into every club's calendar, for the sake of the safety of our livers as much as political correctness. Needless to say they weren't too popular, or very well attended, if they were even organised at all.
Last night we descended on the local High Street in vast numbers to celebrate the halfway point in our course with an extended pub crawl, from the Union Bar all the way through the suburbs and out miles further, eventually finishing at the revered temple of dirty alcohol, Jesters. About 100 of us trawled the streets for 5 hours dressed up as what we wanted to be when we were kids, hitting pub after pub. We eventually came to the most run-down, cramped, dangerous, unhygienic, cheap, tacky sweatbox in the south of England. But Jesters is home, the venue of our passing from quiet little freshers into fully grown incompetent doctors. Only last week one of my mates broke her arm there by falling on a well placed unmarked step in the middle of nowhere, but she was back, accompanied by her cast, boozing away.
Crammed onto the dance floor, flailing away to total cheese mixed with modern dance and rock, playing impromptu games of "pass the chunk of polystyrene from mouth to mouth", all the week's stress and new knowledge float away on a cloud of cheap vodka and sour orange juice. And, after 8 consecutive hours of boozing, we stumble home, retching attractively every few hundred yards. Suddenly our Jesus and astronaut costumes look a bit out of place, but it doesn't bother us as we moon walk, or bless passers by.
Friday mornings are semi-compulsory lectures (obviously nobody attends), so we get a few hours kip before the cogs of the daily grind start turning again. That's the thing about medics, they will happily relieve you of your alcohol supply, but if you leave the Times crossword lying around, it will mysteriously get finished. We're a multi-faceted bunch.
Sure, we work hard, but we also play hard, and even if I say so myself, we're damn good at it.