Heya! I hope everyone had a fun and safe St. Patrick's Day!
So, I want to start of this post by saying I am really sad that I am already half way through my time here in Ireland. This experience is changing my life and I feel so blessed that I was able to do this. :)
As most of you know I spent my St. Patrick's Day in Dublin's fair City, where the girl's are so pretty... I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone... SORRY only heard that song about 1,000 times this past weekend. SO, where did we leave off before? I believe it was just about my amazing weekend with Meghan and Cason? Well before we get into the St Patty's Shenanigans, I probably should talk a little bit about work since that is the real reason I came here (right guys?? Well you all know the truth... ahem, pubs and irish accents). As you well know I am working in the Department of Public Health with a focus on Infectious Diseases and mostly Tuberculosis and how they handle outbreaks here in the South and West of Ireland. I had the privilege of going to Galway last week for a TB conference, which was very fascinating to me, but would be truly boring to most of you, so I will just skip to the funny part. At the end of the day we had a panel discussion where people could ask whatever questions they want about the laws surrounding people who have active TB, etc. One of the speakers on the panel was answering a question about something and said, "I think we need to stop looking to the UK and Australia for answers all the time but instead look to our neighbors to the West... I know we don't like them and the Americans have funny accents, but they are doing good work in TB." So, the smart ass that you all know and love to be me, decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to ask a question...
So, I raise my hand and say, in the MOST American accent I can stand to pull off, "Hey there, token American here!" and then asked my question... of course everyone laughed including the guy who just insulted our accents... But they do have a point. Irish accents sound way cooler than ours. They get to see "Grand" without sounding snotty.
Last week I also had to go to a daycare center because they had an outbreak of E.Coli, so we had to hand out containers to everyone to take a sample so we could test them to see if more people had them. And by "we could test them" I mean the labs... I DID NOT test them myself. Ew. Anyways, this was an interesting experience because the only room that was free where we could set up our stations and meet with the parents was in the pre-school classroom. There we no normal sized chairs, just the little tiny ones that 4 year olds fit in. Also, we were there for about 5 hours, so naturally I would need to use a restroom... but no there were no adult toilets in here, just little midget ones. This was the first time in my life where I actually felt like a giant... Or like I had been blown up by Rick Moranis and his faulty machine for a terrible sequel movie.
All-in-all I am loving where I am working. All the ladies I work with are super sweet and always love to hear my stories about my travels so far. One of the older ladies calls me "Pet" which I think is kind of sweet... any-who, on to the interesting stuff...
ST. PATRICK'S DAY.... DUBLIN.
A friend of mine from high school was going to Dublin with some friends of his so I decided to meet up with them! I got there Friday afternoon and met them... Everyone else thought that we should go to bed early, but my friend and I decided to stay out and drink more. See, hind sight is always 20/20 because being hungover at the beginning of St. Patrick's Day is probably NOT a good idea...
Anyways, Friday night was enjoyable, but Saturday was absolutely insane! After I dropped my bags off at my hostel, we met up with everyone at a pub to get some coffeeeeeeeeeeee. They didn't start serving alcohol until 12:30pm here (legally) which was a strange change from the usual 8am start in the states for st pattys. So we decided to walk around to find a spot to watch the parade. The place was packed, mind you, this is about an hour before the parade is even set to start. While we were walking around we got to see the full impact of the types of people who were in Dublin for my favorite holiday. For example, one lady had on a horse mask with her green outfit. This confused me... maybe I am missing something but I thought St. Patrick drove some snakes out and didn't have anything to do with horses? Or maybe she was just a weirdo... we will never know. We couldn't find anywhere really where we might be able to see the parade... and then we heard you could actually just watch it on TV! So, we walked a few hundred feet away from the parade route and into a pub waiting for the magical time of 12:30 to get that first Guinness and watch the parade on television, dry and warm and seated... So picture this: we are literally watching a parade on TV in a bar while the parade is going past us, maybe 100 yards away... makes sense. (My dad sent me an article a couple days later that predicted there were about 500,000 people at the parade). Now this was no ordinary parade but rather the weirdest and trippy-est parade I have EVER seen. The theme had to do with science, and each group had to make up a float and theme based on a science question, like for example "Why don't we fall off of the earth?' but it had to be in some weird artsy, freaky way I guess because that is what a lot of them did. For that particular question they had a bunch of people dancing around in Clown/Mime outfits and apples... spinning around... I don't understand what Clowns have to do with Gravity, unless the purpose was to state how much they wish Clowns would, in fact, fall off of the earth and disappear forever... because that is what I wish they would do. (most of you know how much I hate Clowns...) The floats though were incredibly elaborate which was cool to see.
After the parade, well, we just kept on drinking Guinness. Typical. And the crowds headed to the pubs... we stayed a O'Neills pub for awhile, but as it got more and more crowded we decided to venture off to see what the streets were like and how many crazy people, including us, were on them. As we were walking towards the Temple Bar area we walked right past an African-American little person dressed as a Leprechaun, and naturally one of the guys I was with decided to bro-five him... I almost made water in my pants I laughed so hard.... OH, the "made water" reference. So, I guess the guys I met up with had met people that said they had to "make water" when going towards to the toilets, so we just adopted saying that all weekend...
Ok I hate to cut it short tonight but I have to go to bed. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow....
GOOD NIGHT :)
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