Happy St. Paddy's Day!

St. Patrick's day. What a phenomena. Sometimes also called St. Paddy's day with all the love irish people have. Lectures and work were cancelled for this day so that everybody could just enjoy the celebration of irish nature. St. Patrick is a catholic celebration, so it is really IRISH. And as one person well notted: "To go outside on St. Patrick's day with a british flag is a suicide." Remember this for later.

I feel now St. Patrick is celebrated worldwide. In the Czech Republic too. I've never seen much sense in celebrating St. Patrick's in the Czech Republic. To me it appears like mixture of pleasure from green beer and from idea of getting drunk in clothes you normally try to hide you have... Hm... Actually it sounds quite czech.

In Belfast, we gathered as Erasmus students, dressed with at least some green accessories and went to the city. We had meeting at 11 am, some of the people were already really drunk in the time I was trying to wake up. When I saw our group going through the city, it seemed a bit funny. We went kind of crazy about the dresses. With guiness beer hats on heads, hairbands in shape of leprechaun hat, big green hats, green braces, trousers, jackets... Locals we met on our way to the city center had green sweater if anything. So it seemed that the only crazy people excesively buying all the green and giant stuff in souvenir shops are tourists and kids.

Ready for action

The city was truly living during St. Patrick's day. There was a parade starting at the city hall and then concert near the Lagan river. Both of these were really lovely, filled with irish dance, music and culture overall. There was live music in every pub through whole day. Mostly it was one of the best bands I've heard in Belfast so far. Obviously irish people have few favourite songs which every band plays at least once in 2 hours. So we heard them 4 times a day at least.The atmosphere in the city was just amazing. BBC news shot a nice video from the official celebrations. You can see it here and listen to amazing Belfast accent of Ms. Mayor. Interesting was also a lot of bagpipes in the parade, which I always considered scottish. Scottish influences infiltrated the celebrations even more. At least in form of a spanish student wearing a scottish traditional hat with tag "Ireland" and ginger wig atteched to it. Typical Catalan. It was amusing to look at him - always made my day.

Wild Rover - irish classic song of classic songs :)

The Belle of Belfast City - you can probably guess why this one is so popular in Belfast

Do you remember how I told you the connection between british flag and suicide? When we went back from the concert, there was a small camp with cca 50 british flags in front of the city hall. The camp was there few times before, but St. Paddy is St. Paddy. So suddenly all the streets around the City Hall were crowded with mostly kids, 13 to 18 years of age I would guess, with Irish flag on their shoulders, making mess and bad stuff like pouring lemonade on the ground and stepping into puddles of icecream (I am not exaggerating, they were really doing it like a bad stuff). And between this crowd and little british camp there were 3 rows of tough policemen in the black hard suits. Overall in the city there was few little "troubles" and arresting people who were delinquent or on drugs or both. I think this is only a sign of the vivid atmosphere in the city.

As the time was passing, people were getting more and more crazy. Around 3 pm we went back from the city center to spend some short time at the university area to get back into the city for evening fun, dance and music everywhere. But university accommodation is probably the wildest environment for the St. Paddy's day. There were policemen going through streets every few meters to watch the law and order. Probably really only to watch it and not intervene much with hundreds of drunk students. Gathering points were ATM, shop and frontgardens. The frontgardens of houses were crowded, naked people were dancing on walls, furniture was dragged outside, everybody was really drunk and doing the most stupid things they could think off. During this day I saw the most of bleeding people and fighting couples in my life, most of them in the univeristy area. Last but not least, the only SOS bus we saw in the city this day was in the university area. SOS buses are another opportunity for you to volunteer and make communal life smooth. So SOS buses are in the streets on Friday nights and other drinking days to offer you free coffee, tea, water, even bread. And if you feel sick, they will take you inside and give you time and space to recover. I find this public service a bit scary.

We spent some time in the crazy university area and it resulted in a decision to go to party to the city again and my friends being in very lovely mood. So we went to the Cuckoo's for another round of live music. To make it short, one of my friends was gently removed from the bar by bodyguards, because he was sleeping on the stairs. Then he decided to go home on his own. He didn't have keys, only his housemate had them, he went to wrong direction and got lost, we found his wallet in the bar and his passport was lost for good (luckily the other day it was found back in the bar again). Thank God some genius compassionate person put him into taxi and sent back to the center (all of this before 10pm). Even though this could seem like a sad story, the saddest thing about St. Patrick's day for me was that I was sick a bit, so I had one hot whiskey in the afternoon. That meant I just observed other people being in their creative mood dancing naked on the walls and loosing passports. Not that I would like to join them.

Motto of the day: Allways know where do you have your keys, passport, and friends.

My favourite St. Patrick on a big yellow bike