St Patricks day and my birthday

My tip from last time for Australia to win the world cup is looking in good shape at the moment.

What's been happening here? Two weekends ago was St Patricks day and what better place to celebrate it than in Ireland!

St Patricks day lasts for about a week here (but St Patricks day sounds much better than St Patricks week so I'll stick to calling it that). There are various shows on leading up to the day (17th of March) and there is a fair, kind of like the Easter show, for the three days of the long weekend. On the day itself the main event is a parade along O'Connell St (the main street in Dublin). I went to the parade with a couple of friends but we slept in so we got there too late to see the parade properly.

We were about five metres back from the barrier so it was difficult to see over the top of the people in front of us. Some of the floats in the parade were big so we could see them allright but when it was just people walking along we didn't really know what was going on. There were some people who arrived even later than us but they came prepared - with ladders which they just set up behind the crowd, had about 3 or 4 people climb up the ladder and they all got a great view of it.

While we were watching the parade we were trying to work out if there was a theme or if people could just make whatever float they felt like and take it into the parade because there didn't seem to be anything in common between the floats (later on I found out the theme was 'Mythical creatures' or something like that which made a little bit of sense).

After the parade we went to the pub (of course) to drink guinness (of course). It was a fun day, that night we ended up watching Ireland playing cricket and beating Pakistan.

On the Sunday there was supposed to be a massive fireworks display which I was looking forward to watching. However the Irish weather had other ideas and started to snow which meant the fireworks had to be cancelled.

On the Monday (which was a public holiday - probably because most people were still hungover from Saturday and wouldn't be any use at work anyway) I went on a bus trip to Wicklow and Glendalough. The weather was freezing, as you can see from my photos but the scenary was pretty spectacular. The Wicklow mountains are in County Wicklow which is next to Dublin, less than an hours drive away. Because they are slightly higher than Dublin they're just a bit colder and the snow wasn't melting as soon as it hit the ground. In the afternoon we went back down a bit to Glendalough which was an ancient Monastic settlement and the weather was mostly sunny so those photos from there make for a big contrast with the ones from the morning.

The best bit of the day for me was the creek behind the pub where we had lunch. After eating I went for a walk (it was warm and sunny at the time) along the creek and just couldn't stop taking photos of it. It looked so nice with the sun and the flowing water and there wasn't any one else around so it was nice and peaceful.

The weekend after Paddys day was my birthday. Mona came over from Germany and on the Saturday night we went out with a few of my friends to watch Australia and South Africa play (fantastic timing that this game was on near my birthday!) and then we went to a pub in Dublin called 'Howl at the Moon', no werewolves there but it was still really cool. We couldn't get a taxi home so had to walk for 45 minutes listening to Dave do Yoda impersonations for most of the way, but to be fair, he does do a very good Yoda.

I took Monday off work and Mona and I went to Malahide, about 30 minutes north of Dublin to see Malahide Castle. It was a really nice castle and one of the oldest in Ireland. A family lived there for 800 years up until 1975 when the last surviving member of the family sold it to the council and moved to Tasmania. Inside the castle now is a collection of furniture from the medieval period which was quite interesting.