St Patrick's Day

St Patrick's day in Ireland. What could be better, right? Wrong. It was not at all what I expected. It was very strange, actually. My friends and I got up and decked ourselves out with green (shirts, face-paint, flashing shamrock earrings) and then headed downtown to watch the parade. Once downtown we noticed a general lack of green clothing. The Irish don't wear green on St. Patrick's day. In fact, people knew were not Irish because of our green-ness and our intense face paint. Now, they weren't dressed entirely normally, some people wore a Guinness hat, or a big green hat of some kind, but for the most part they weren't as into it as I had expected.

Now about the parade. This was probably the dinkiest, most random, irrelevant parade I have ever been to. The theme wasn't St Patrick's day, it was outer space. Most of the floats had something to do with space (kids dressed as dancing Star Wars characters, paper mache suns and moons, astronauts) but others had nothing to do with either space OR St Patrick's day (like the belly dancers or the boxing club or the three or four bands of little children playing the tin whistle). Here are a few pictures so you get the idea:

Aliens

Astronauts

Children playing the tin whistle (basically like the recorder that all kids learn to play in the US)

So the parade was kind of a disappointment, but it was fun to see the people there watching it. Living in a student apartment complex and going to college, we are often only surrounded by Irish college students. It was fun to be out in the city on St Patrick's day and see children and families! Although it was not very Irish-y (but I suppose the expression "everyone is Irish for a day" doesn't really apply because everyone is Irish EVERY day) the city was packed with people hanging out and having a good time (or "having the craic"). It was a pretty nice day so everyone was outside, going in and out of pubs and just enjoying the atmosphere of the day.

Having wondered why "Irish" wasn't enough of a theme for a St. Patrick's day parade and why we kept getting strange looks in our uber green get-ups, my friends and I tried to figure out why it just wasn't what we expected. Like I said briefly in my previous post, I think it is like how now that I don't live in Maine, I love it more than ever. It is easy to take a place (your home) for granted when you live there because you are there all the time and the people you are around are there all the time too. There is no one around who just doesn't understand how amazing of a place it is. Thats how I see St. Patrick's day. In Ireland, there is no need for people to go crazy with Irish pride because everyone else here is Irish as well. Irish Americans, however have this one day to celebrate their Irish pride and rub the amazing-ness of their heritage in everyone's faces. Its no wonder that they advertise trips to New York for St Patrick's day on TV here. What better place to celebrate your country's favorite holiday than with people who don't take it for granted?

So St. Patrick's day in Ireland-- not as exciting as I expected. In fact, I've heard that New York and Boston are even better. Here it is less about wearing green and drinking green beer (they would scoff at that here, by the way) and more about having yet another excuse to go to the pubs and drink.