What an experience! I was in the mecca! We woke up at 8 andstarted getting ready for the festival. The parade was at noon, so there was a lot to do in a short period of time. We returned to Julia's for breakfast. Joanna, Ann and Maddie had all left and we were down to the original five of us again. I'd talked to Sean, and we figured that we'd meet by the statue on O'Connell, which was great in theory. John purposely slept in, so he missed all of our morning activities. When we got to O'Connell street, it took us an hour and a half to walk down to where we wanted to meet, and visibility was relatively poor. People started to scream at each other trying to walk by, it was shoulder to shoulder unmoving angry people. We quickly decided it wasn't the scene for us, so we headed down to temple bar, where everyone was hanging out. We found Sean and his friends from Maynooth down there, and that's where John met up with us as well. It was sunny and warm, so everyone was just hanging around in the streets talking with live music all around. We stayed for a couple of hours. We had to fight our way into the grocery store for snacks, there were literally guards there pushing one or two people out and pulling one or two in because it was that popular, although most people were heading straight for the alcohol section to drink in the streets. Now I understood why my roommate said that all of the Irish people fled Dublin for the holiday! I laughed pretty hard because I walked by tourists who said "the temple bar area is the oldest in all of Ireland"... I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I hope I never sounded that ignorant during my first month, but I'm sure I did! Eventually we made our way to O'Reilley's again and stayed there for most of the night after struggling to get in because so many people were in town. We were thrilled when we snagged a booth to sit in. After all day I was getting hungry and everyone wanted to go get food, but I wasn't really feeling like paying for anything else, so I headed out to school to eat, then came back down to the city after. Dublin, Ireland for Paddy's Day? Check.
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