St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day has always been a big holiday for me since majority of my ancestral roots come from Ireland. Therefore, this holiday was especially celebrated while I was over here.

My original plans were to go to Dublin, figuring that the best place to celebrate the holiday would actually be in Ireland. I found a tour and invited all of my friends, but at the end I decided to back out due to multiple suggestions to not go. It was interesting for me to hear all of these people say "Don't go to Ireland for St. Patrick's Day... it's not celebrated." Their logic and views come from people have originally gone over and found that the holiday is celebrated more as a religious holiday instead of the green rivers of drinking as it is in America.

So instead of going to Dublin, I decided to go to the celebrations here in London, which was an amazing event. This celebration took place on the Sunday before St. Patrick's Day and a group of my friends and I traveled to central London to watch the parade and the concert going on. We were a little slow getting started and missed the parade but stayed at the concert and festival for the better part of the day. I had the wonderful experience of meeting my friend Emma who is from Belfast and so far is the most Irish person I have ever met.

As mentioned before I love my Irish heritage so I went to London supporting the green, white, and orange flag. We all bought face paint and everyone had flags on their face, but I decided to take it another step and make my entire face the flag of Ireland. =) The result was terrific, and after I dyed my hair green, I received looks from every person I walked past.

Then after the festival and celebrations we went around central London for a pub crawl. After going to a few different pubs we took the party back to our local residence in London and went to one of our favorite pubs Coronation Hall. This is due to a number of facts, one being it is the cheapest pub in our area, another because it is well designed so our group of friends may have our own almost private party. Needless to say it was a very long night and a longer morning...

However, the celebrations were not over and my friends and went out the next night to have ourselves a Guinness at the stroke of midnight on St. Patrick's Day. One Guinness turned into a few more and the celebrations continued from the night, to the morning, to the afternoon, to the night of St. Patrick's Day. It was some of the most fun I've had and I made a lot of friends in the process of the three days.

Little did I know, my celebrations were going to come to an abrupt end the next day...