St. Paddy's Day

Since St Patrick's fell on a Saturday, Star, Monique, and I started the day out by getting fresh doughnuts from the wonderful doughnut man at the St. Nick's market. After a quick stop at the 2 Euro store for some green goodness we went up to watch the parade.  

Adorable Irish boy watching parade

There were all sorts of super-cute-dimpled-Irish-children both watching and marching in the parade.  It was fun to see all the little ruby teams and youngsters with their tiny hurlers for hurling.


It was interesting to see how diverse Galway actually is with everything from the Russian Cultural Society to the Ghana Community participating in the parade, since Galway generally appears rather vanilla compared to DC and all.

Adorable Irish boy in parade 

There were also a couple of political leaning parade participants the best being the bank-zombies. Because clearly all parades should involve some walking-dead.

And the Garda / police chief with a bright-green-and-already-impressive-mustache put my green streaks to shame.

There was all sorts of green all over in honor of St Paddy's Day. I was informed that St Patrick can be shortened to Paddy, but St. Patty's Day is not acceptable. Patty's = not a thing. Paddy = proper Irish nickname.



After the parade we headed over to  our Irish friends' flat and started celebrating with them.  They even fed us a full Irish breakfast. And I not only tried, but actually enjoyed the black pudding. You should be impressed by my adventurous-traveler-ness which is willing to eat things like black pudding even after I'm fully aware of what goes into making them. They turn out pretty yummy though so it's grand. Sure.

This year there happened to be a rugby match between Ireland and England on St. Patrick's Day so we all watched it.  Then Ireland lost terribly (as in a 29 to 9 level of terribly) so there was a lot of angry Irishmen by the end.  But my favorite part was definitely the beginning, because everyone sang along with the Irish national anthem and then when God Save the Queen started they sang the Irish national anthem again much louder and in Irish to drowned out the English anthem. There was lots of drinking and a good bit of music for the rest of the day and then everyone got Monday off as a bank holiday to boot. 

The flat's pet robot Rad was decked out for Paddy's Day with a pot of
gold, Guinness, a hurling ball, and some green and orange too.