My grandmother had the great fortune to be in Ireland for St. Patrick's Day weekend, so we decided to make the trip up to Dublin to spend the day. The forecast for the weekend was pretty typical of Ireland: cloudy with a slight chance of rain. So, being hardy Oregonians, we packed our umbrellas and wore light jackets and figured we'd be totally fine right? WRONG! As we reached the outskirts of Dublin what do we see outside the windows of the bus...snow. Now your first thought might be that it would be awesome to have it snow on St. Patrick's Day, to see all the green contrasted with beautiful white stuff. However, when you don't have hats, gloves, scarves, or normal jackets..well snow becomes a whole different story.
To add to the incorrect weather forecast, the bus dropped us off near a castle and said "See everyone at 8 tonight!".....So we stood there shivering in the snow, no map, and no clue as to where we were let alone where the parade was going to be. We decided to become sheep and follow the mass. That, plus asking for directions (something that would later on in our journeys around Ireland become very unhelpful), led us to one of my most favorite places in the entire world: Starbucks. And while Starbucks may not be very exciting to some people, a hot drink and a dry place to watch the parade was good enough for us.
The parade turned out to be a little odd but really fun and fantastic at the same time. There were so many people from all over the world coming together to celebrate and I still can't believe we were there. After the parade we walked around the city for awhile, scouting the shops and trying not to get run over by drunken mobs. Every once in a while we went back to Starbucks to get warm, and then we found a great little pizza joint for dinner. All in all it was a crazy but fun day and I'm glad I got to share it with my grandma.
Here are just a few of the pictures from the parade:
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