St. Patrick's Day in Dubin

Hello everyone!

Below you will find the video of the experience I had spending St. Patrick's Day in Dublin City.

We got the train to Dublin at 9am and even then the Connelly Train station was buzzing with excitement. (We by the way includes the John Carroll Three, five girls from St. Norbert College, and six of our Irish friends).
We saw the parade at noon and then walked around enjoying the atmosphere. The city was packed! There was wall to wall people on every street. My comparison was that New York City and Time Square had New Year's Eve, but Dublin has St. Patrick's Day!

The parade was really interesting because there was barely anything Irish about it! Most of it was composed of groups from the various cities and counties around Ireland. During the week of St. Patrick's celebration in Dublin, there is a festival in and around St. Stephan's Green. Here, all the community art groups show off their exhibits of creative dance and artistic float design. These are then all involved with the parade, giving the parade the feeling of a World Festival, which I thought was really very interesting.

There were various bagpipe groups and some other irish things, but for the most part every new group presented a new and exciting display for the crowd. Some were settings of an Arabian night, some had dancing chefs chasing half cracked eggs, and one was made up of giant mechanical insects! The praying mantas could hover its head well into the gathered crowds to give all the kids a fright.

After the parade we walked to the Temple Bar district, and that was certainly crazy! Shoulder to shoulder people everywhere you went presented the task of navigation in a difficult way. It even took us 9 minutes to cross the Ha' Penny bridge (a task usually taking no more than 15 seconds if you don;t stop). But we made due, and everyone made it out alive.

We stopped at O'Neils near Trinity College for a pint to celebrate the day, then headed home on the train.
Once we got back to Maynooth we relaxed a bit and went to the Roost for the evening. Now, the small hometown pub would currently have a traditional Irish music band playing for St. Patrick's Day, right?

Well "The Philippineo Trio" played many great songs for us that night, ranging from Beatles hits, Lady Gaga and some traditional Irish ballads as well. The craic was great and the day was one to never be forgotten.

Hope you enjoy the video!
St. Patrick's Day in Dublin


Cheers
Patrick