As you might have guessed, St. Patrick’s Day is a very big deal here in Ireland. It’s a national holiday, so everyone gets off of school and work to celebrate and every city has their own parade! I’m very lucky to have been in Ireland for it ☘️
The Limerick parade was at noon, so Ava, Nevaeh and I left at 10:30am to get a good spot and coffee on the way! It worked because we got a front row spot!
The parade included many celebrations of various aspects of Irish culture, especially music and dancing. Some videos below (they are very short clips because the blog program won’t let me upload a file more than 2MB 😭 )!
The most impressive was this aerial act — the girl was doing tricks on her hoop while the parade was moving!
We also got to see UL in the parade! They were the very last group! A few of them dressed up as Disney or Universal characters, one of them was a minion!
Something I found really cool about this parade was the amount of groups representing different nationalities and identities. Yes, there were a lot of Ireland flags, but there were just as many from other countries all over the world. A lot of people held an Ireland flag in one hand and a different flag in the other. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything but an American flag in a Fourth of July parade. Maybe the holidays aren’t exactly apples to apples, but it was still moving that the parade so heavily featured diversity within a common identity instead of just “WE ARE AMERICAN!”
It was actually really touching to see how much pride people had in waving their flags, Irish and other. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much pride in my country, especially not right now. That’s a common theme I’ve noticed while here — everyone gets so excited to talk about their home countries and encourages you to visit, whereas I am kind of embarrassed to admit where I’m from and don’t feel inclined to tell anyone to visit the States. I hope someday I can be as proud of where I’m from, as everyone in this parade was. For now, I’ll be proud to be part Irish!
Anyways, onto a lighter subject — the one you’re all waiting for…going out on St. Patrick’s Day!
I went out with a group of six other St. Thomas students to two different places. The first place was very crowded and I did not love the music, but the second place was more fun and had good music! I’m glad I did it, but going out is really not my thing, probably wouldn’t do it again honestly. Maybe you have to be drinking to enjoy it, I dunno.
One last funny little story for you: on the bus into the city, there was a group of guys sitting in front of us that had already been drinking. One of them was so drunk he spent the entire bus ride practicing being cool to get into the bars because they would turn you away if you were too drunk 🤦♀️
Hope you all had a good St. Patricks Day too!
– From Limerick
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