I’ve heard plenty of mixed reviews about spending St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland. Though it is a national holiday where most Irish are given the day off from work and school, I’ve still heard that it is more of an American holiday than an Irish one. This was certainly confirmed when I arrived in Galway and spoke of the friends who were coming to visit me for the special day. Mr G rolled his eyes and said he, himself, had never been to any of the St. Patrick’s Day festivities. Hmm… Well.
I narrowed out staying the day in Dublin after I had heard that Dublin is just a collection of Aussies and American’s in town for the holiday. I didn’t really fancy the idea of spending this day with anyone other than Irish people. So I spent the couple of months I was in Galway making plans and scoping out details of what was going on in hopes that I could give my American visitors a good time. Like happens with most of my plans, once we started drinking, there was no way we were following anything I had put together previously.
Originally, we were headed to the parade that was heading up Quay Street and Shop Street in Galway. Originally, we were going to head from there, straight to the bars and 
the plan was to be sufficiently pissed by 3 PM. From there, we would pop around from pub to pub in our Irish regalia causing a general ruckus. Ya. No. None of that happened.
We woke up at noon; the parade was at 12:30. Scratch that idea. Rather than head into the pub immediately, we decided we would walk up to the corner store and buy some pre-game drinks and lunch. We then sat down at the kitchen table with Mr. G and drank mimosas, Guinness and cider while chatting about God knows what. After a couple hours, Mr. G disappeared and we decided we should make our faces seen since there was no point in spending the whole day drinking with ourselves.
The only part of my plan that did actually occur was going to see my friend Matt at the Salt House. I had promised him that I would bring in my lot with our feather boas and dirty up his bar as much as possible. After putting on his fake Irish beard hat, there wasn’t much left to do here though, so we headed in town for our pub crawl.
I won’t pretend to remember what happened at this point. All I know is that we went into Sonny’s for ONE pint before heading to the next bar, but we never left. In true drunken bullet point style, I will now recount the pieces of the night that I do remember:
- Tequila shots (at least 4 or 5)
- Running into a friend from Inishmore
- Making some new friends (where have you been the whole time I’ve been in Galway?!)
- One of new friends stealing Brian’s St. Paddy’s Day Hat and him replying “That man has my hat. Go get my hat.”
That’s it. Almost 10 hours of my life and that is most of what I remember. The rest I can’t disclose because I don’t want to embarrass Emily. But let’s just say that when the two of us arrived home on our own VERY early in the morning and found we were 
locked out of my house, we had PLENTY to talk about as we sat down the street for breakfast.
For those of you haters who say that St. Paddy’s Day is not fun in Ireland – I beg to differ. The only way you can NOT have a good time is if you suck because it’s difficult to make any holiday dedicated to drinking not be fun.
And that’s my two cents.