St. Paddy's Day-Ireland Style! (Kinda...)

This year I was fortunate enough to spend St. Patrick's Day in good ol' Eire, and what a day it was! The weather was GORGEOUS and it was just one huge party for over 24 hours. We went to numerous parties, had a party in our apartment, and went to the parade (not all in that order)! The one thing that was glaringly obvious was that we were Americans to the core. No one over here dresses up for it (except maybe in Dublin), but that definitely didn't stop us! We went all out...

This is Kelly's completely outrageous outfit. She was definitely the craziest of the lot of us.

Jenna borrowed Kelly's boa a few times for pictures but she was the least dressed up of us all.

I had quite a bit going on. You cant see it, but I have shamrock clips in my hair and later I had a hat.

The four of us together at Mrijan's apt.


It turns out that our street was the staging area for the parade!


A whole big group of us!

Our lovely view of the parade.

The crowd was huge! (This is a street called Grand Parade)

We were waiting in line for sausages (there is this one stand that sets up at all of the events in town and their sausages are incredible!) and saw this float coming down the street toward us (the float is on South Mall Street).

We ran into Toni!

And he and Patrick came with us to the Thirsty Scholar for...

Green beer!

Jake stole some of Kelly's stuff to wear.

After the parade everyone just walked down the streets since they were closed for the day.

This is on the South Mall boardwalk. These stalls sold food and crafts. So much fun!


On our way home we walked past Holly, Liz, and Kate soaking up some sun!

We went to a party and Laura and Jenna got ahold of the tots! (really, they weren't actual tater tots, but they were still really yummy...and really, how much more Irish can you get than potatoes?)

When we finally made it back to our apt we gave Toni shamrock tattoos.

Then we started a dance party! (Rince ar an mbord!=Dance on the table!)


That would be part of the door to our washing machine. The machine somehow broke while we were in the Gaeltacht and Margaret sent someone up to free Toni's clothes. They said that they fixed it. They lied. The door has to be pried open with a fork. At least it still washes our clothes!


Patrick played DJ.





Kelly and I ventured out in search of dinner and it was still beautiful out!

Then the party really started in our apt. I think we had about 30 people by the time we left for the night.

This is some random Irish guy who is a friend of Irene.

Andrew all decked out in St. Paddy's day stuff and his Washington St. pub crawl shirt.

Aitor did the pub crawl too, but they were out of shirts at the end so they gave him a hat instead!

So that was our St. Patrick's Day celebration! It was a great time and was a fun break from studying for exams and writing papers as the semester comes to an end (only one week left now!).

Coming up this week I have 2 Irish exams (one oral and one written), 2 archaeology tests (for different courses), and an archaeology essay. It'll be a stressful week, but the good news is that after this I'm done with school for the year! Just 5 exams in May over a total of 4 days, so technically I have 9 days left of my junior year of college!

One week from today I leave on my excavation trip which will last about 5 days, then the day after I get home from that I leave on Eurotrip! Two weeks from tonight I'll be back sleeping in the Dublin airport waiting for my crazy early flight to Madrid!

I'm not sure if I've gone over this before, but here is how we're going about our trip:
Cork -> Dublin -> Madrid -> Barcelona (day trip to Andorra) -> Paris -> Berlin -> Prague -> Vienna -> London -> Cork
All in 16 days...it will be crazy, but sooo much fun! And this time there will be 5 of us traveling together instead of just me and one other person. Cant wait!

And now I had better be off...lots of studying and paper-writing left to do, but this was a nice little break to relive the good times last week.