My Paddy’s day with ch’copain - Antonin

Hi folks! It’s been a while since my last post; I know that you missed me but I’m back and today I’m going to talk about… *drum rolls* … SAINT PATRICK’S DAY!

You might have noticed that Antoine and John also wrote something about it, we all wanted to so we decided everyone would write his own experience. So let’s start with some history! In advance I apologise to Christians that read this article and might feel offended, I’m not a fan of the great bearded hippie up there and religions in general.

Basically, St Patrick was the guy that brought Christianity in the second half of the fifth century in Ireland. Back in the day, Christians were respecting what’s called the Lenten restrictions on eating and drinking alcohol. But since these pointless restraints were lifted for the day, our lovely Christians started to feast as hell in the name of God. Giving the Irish Christians an excuse to get wasted and glimpse the paradise, St Patrick was and is much loved and celebrated here. I might sound critical but in the end I like Paddy too: good job dude!

Now that you know why, let’s talk about how. St Patrick’s Day was on Tuesday 17th March. On this day there is a parade and many people on the street, but I’ll come to that later. Usually the “celebration”, yes “celebration”, of St Patrick starts the week end before and you have from Friday to Tuesday to move around Dublin and see what’s going on. Therefore my friend Anthony a.k.a. ch’copain decided to join me for this adventure.

To sum up his stay, here are the main things we did every day:

• Resting from last night's hangover

• Eating junk food

• Walking in Dublin

• Pub crawl until late

The only visit Anthony did was… the Guinness Storehouse! (Hey let’s stick to the theme, right?). Beside pub crawl, we went to a party with friends of mine I met in the hostel I stayed and with some classmates. These two evenings were really great because for once we spoke with people other than French ones.

And now, the actual paddy’s day. We joined Charles, Louis and Antoine in city centre at about 12am; which was too late to have a good spot to see the parade but we already expected that. The city centre was really too crowded so we decided to follow the parade journey until finding a convenient spot and guess what? We didn’t… We barely viewed some parts of the parade but for what I saw I didn’t find it impressive. Basically it was disguised people dancing in the street and to me there wasn’t enough music and floats. The most impressive thing was the number of people wearing green hats and clothes. After the parade, we passed by temple bar but we didn’t try to get in because of the mob. Therefore we returned to our favourite activity: pub crawl! And this is pretty much how Anthony’s trip in Ireland ended. We were expecting to see the Liffey River artificially greener than usual like in some American cities but sadly it wasn’t.

Alright, I think I’ve covered the main things we did. As usual, I let you see more photos in the gallery.

Cheers! Or should I say: Sláinte!

Antonin