Paddy's day the Irish way..

First of all, Congratulations To Jessica and Kenny for welcoming Lyla June Spitzer to the world on St. Patrick's Day! I cannot wait to meet her!


All rightty lets see, what have I been up to since last registering and applying for housing...Uhm We have been accepted to live in Hodgins next year, so I have roommates and a place to stay, not sure which room yet though, but I am not worried about that. My classes are all messed up, but I only have one year left, so honestly, I think I will survive!


That group project I did with my non-english group earned a B...kind of disappointed but, we have another one due Thursday, hopefully it will go better. The 38 page paper I did with my group (that my Mother and Grandmother know the story about...) got an A1 which is an A+ --I'd like to thank Guilford for being a writing intensive college; I never thought I would be the one peer-editing and improving a paper, but I am so glad I did!


Last week pretty much flew by. Mondays I only have 1 class, Tuesdays -2, Wed- 0 Thursday-I'm in class from 9am-6pm and Fridays-2....well Thanks to Paddy's day, Thursday classes were cancelled and one of my classes Friday was as well, so pretty much barely had class last week.

Thursday we got on the bus at 6:30am to head to Dublin to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and watch the largest parade in the country... We arrived about half nine (9:30am), and some guys were already hitting the beer bong- when in Ireland I guess...

We were a few hours early for the parade, so we decided to walk around, buy some souvenirs, some girls bought some festive decorations and then we found a pub that was open and serving breakfast. So we all went in to have our "Irish breakfasts". It was a cute little pub, I have posted pics up to facebook
 ( www.facebook.com/tayphilly12 ) I will say that my picture-taking skills were slacking Thursday, for the parade and everything sorry!...We struggled to find seats for all of us so we split up so we could b seated faster, the pub was crazy-packed. I have always known that you are supposed to wear green on this holiday, but I have always celebrated at school; we all know there are some kids that are "too cool" or "too old" to wear green and play along...Dublin was insane though as far as spirit went. I have never seen so much green or orange in my life. It was a sea of green, there were people everywhere as well. I was so shocked. We foolishly attempted to walk through a gift shop, I think we made it about 15 feet in in about 10 minutes, so we turned around and left. We applied temporary "kiss me I'm Irish", clovers and Irish flag tattoos on ourselves, applied some green face glitter and were off to find places to stand to see the parade. The parade was not due to start for another hour, but everyone in Ireland was in Dublin and there were absolutely no places left to actually watch the parade from. Melanie and I went in search for some of her friends from Penn State, I thought we were just going to say hi, but we ended up staying over there for the entire duration of the parade. I had fun, but did not know anyone of them unfortunately, so it was not as fun as I would have hoped. There were tall guys in front of us, and then a dad that kept his son on his shoulders the whole time, he was the star of my 'parade pictures'. Eventually some of the people in front of us left so I was able to squeeze closer to the road to see the actual parade. There was enough room to stick my hand holding my camera out and snap pictures even though I could not see but they were pretty good I guess. There was a funky theme to the parade, someone mentioned it being based off of a book, but all Melanie and I could see were dogs, three-headed dogs, birds, death related and eyeball floats. It was definitely odd to say the least. Once the parade was over we headed back to the bus to get a lift over to the Guinness factory.

The group did not allow for us to have enough time to actually do the entire tour, gift shop and taste the Guinness, so we cut the tour short, we did the first few levels of it and then just skipped to the top level. It was a lot of fun. We had our free sample pints of Guinness,  it was not green, but they made clover shapes in the foam somehow and it was fun. Guinness is still gross. I am sorry, but I think it is an acquired taste, and I sure as heck don't have it, but I did drink most of it somehow. The view from the top level of Guinnes was amazing, I mean it was only of Dublin, but I never realized how HUGE Dublin really is. It is not a tall city, but dang, I don't think I saw any green land or hills anywhere, there were buildings for as far as I could see!

Before we knew it we had to get back on the bus to head back to Limerick. Once back at Limerick a few of us met up- we ordered some food, and planned the rest of our night. Nothing "big" happened it was kind of a random night of bouncing around from random places, so it is hard to explain, but it was one of those nights that was really fun for no specific reason. We went to go snake hunting for a while with a group, until Rachel and I realized that there are no snakes in this country, thanks to St Patrick banning them, so we decided to forgo the stomping in the mud for nothing.


I had so much fun. People in Ireland really can drink. I know that everything I have said makes it seem like another day and nothing special, but I almost feel as though I expected so much more, but since the Irish drink and party daily, Paddys day was just another day, except they wore green? It was fun none the less, but I think it is a bigger deal in the states, maybe because we party on Holidays rather then on days that end in "y" like everyone in this country seems to do, so those specific days stand out in my mind as a big deal... I can now say that I spent St Patrick's day in Dublin/Ireland though!