Best St. Patrick's Day EVER

Hey heyyy

I'm totally exhausted so I just wanted to (boast??) a bit about my day! :P

Mass this morning was great! As part of the mass (this is apparently tradition) they blessed a bunch of shamrocks and we pinned them to our lapels and wore them all day. It was pretty cool. I mean an entire chunk of plant btw, pinned to your clothes. Lol.

THEN, we grabbed some food (thank you McDonalds) and went to the St. Patrick's Day parade...it's pretty weird and not very Irish at all. But that was fine by us. Unfortunately it started pretty late so we couldn't stay long BECAUSE WE HAD TO HEAD OVER TO CROKE PARK!

So we went there and sat down in the Naughton family's private box (which is one of the 4 best boxes in the stadium btw) and watched the games.
For the Hurling we decided to support Portumna because they're this tiny team from Galway. They lost :( But we're used to teams we like losing. :P

What was most awesome about it though was that each team had this star player who are both arguably the best in decades (if not centuries). Ballyhale's is Henry Shefflin and they call him King Henry (I think he was top scorer this season) and Portumna's is a guy nicknamed "The Prince" he's 21 and he's like a one man show. This guy scored a point FROM 90 YARDS AWAY!
Picture hitting a ball with a wooden stick through two posts from 90 yards away. Suck on that American football.
Anyway...so it was this huge deal and all the papers had titles like "The Prince vs The King" etc etc

As for the Gaelic Football final we were supporting Kilmurry (who also lost). BUT IT WAS SO FUN! BEST SPORT EVER!

So in an earlier post I said I wanted to find a sport worth screaming for. I found TWO!

GAA is amazing. I've never been so excited in my life.
And what's best about it is that these guys are playing at the top level in the country but they're doing it just for the love of the sport. They don't get paid to play and yet they devote all this time (and many many injuries) to it.
There's a great section in the programme where they give player profiles and they list the jobs of the players etc (a lot of them are carpenters, Garda, students, school teachers etc. Regular people who do something simply because they love their team/county/sport.
I may invest in a hurley and sliotar.

OKAY, the day's not over yet though. After that we hit the pubs (and they were packed) so we went off the beaten path a bit to our secret cheap pub near Trinity. There we met up with a friend, Simon, who was in Dublin with his gf and one of her friends for the day. The back story there is that we met Simon (who is Australian but working in London) in a hostel when we went to London and somehow stayed in contact with him.
It was a blast.

BUT it was all really exhausting so now here I am, back in my room at midnight and heading to bed. It's been grand!!!!