St. Patrick's Day weekend in Ireland

I've heard many of my friend's punch list for travelling life include things like:

1. Mardi Gras in New Orleans
2. Carnival in Rio
   
3. Oktoberfest in Munich
   
4. The Hajj in Mecca (sorry, wrong audience)

But by far, all the lists have St. Patrick's Day in Dublin. Pretty cool that we've been able to check that one off our list. Having lived in Chicago for a good decade, I certainly understood March 17th as a significant party day and my expectations of this day in Dublin were pretty set in my mind.

Our plans included the parade downtown and attending the Senior All Ireland Club Championships at Croke Park. Everywhere you go in this country, you'll find a GAA club (Gaelic Athletic Association). There are hundreds of these clubs around the country. Early in the year, each of the clubs in both Hurling and Gaelic football participate in a tournament that culminates in the finals at Croke Park on St. Patrick's day. So these are small town teams of friends and brothers. In talking with my co-workers, winning the championship for your club is pretty much a "get a free drink at the local pub" card for life.

Before we could head out, we had to get J.J. thru his guitar lesson. That accomplished and J.J. well onto the path of greatness playing American Pie, we headed out to the train to make our way down to the parade. On our way to the train, we had a reminder from home. When we would go out for walks, we would often talk of having a "20 slug walk". This day was a "1 slug walk" and a pretty pathetic slug at that.

We were told we should get there early to see anything and that advice was spot on. It was 10 deep and every lamppost and statue was occupied at capacity.

There were a lot of metal sculpture floats that were pretty cool. Marching Bands were also common, but I didn't expect to see the Notre Dame marching band. The only thing better would have been the Xavier Marching Band coming down in the opposite direction and having a brawl break out.

My favourite picture was this one of the boys attempting to catch a better view from the top of posts that line the sidewalks where they don't want cars to attempt to double park on the side-walks.

I've found it very common to find cars parked up on the side-walk in this country.

After about an hour of kids on shoulders and seeing very little, we decided to head for the games.

We made our way to Croke Park. Our delayed departure from home meant we were going to get to the stadium a bit late. This meant we missed most of the Hurling match. We saw the last few moments. It was enough to certainly know that we HAVE TO get to some more of these games. It was incredibly fast moving and exciting. In the end, Loughgeil beat Coolderry.

The second game was the Gaelic Football final. This match was between Crossmaglen and Garrycastle. This was a really exciting game. Imagine soccer, rugby, & football combined. It's a very fast moving game and it seemed like the team doctors were on the field every 5 minutes. The teams score 1 point for kicking the ball through the goal posts and 3 points for kicking it in the goal. You can't pick up the ball with your hands, but can field it on a bounce. It is rolling on ground, you perform this little move where you kick it into your hands with your feet. You can take 4 steps with ball before you much dribble or pass it to another player. You can't throw it, but

must do a hand pass which is a like an underhand serve in volleyball or kick it to another. Unlike soccer, there's plenty of contact and although tackling is supposedly illegal, there seemed to be a lot of it going on. At the end there was a frenzy of activity as Crossmaglen made a furious comeback and came close to winning outright. The game came out to be a draw. The red/green of Garrycastle and the yellow/black of Crossmaglen filed out of the stadium. Nobody seemed too disappointed. There were about 25,000 people at the games.

We did manage to get a Guinness at the stadium, but have found that big parties on St. Patrick's Day will have to wait until the kids are a bit older. It was a very nice day!

Rod's Last Couple of weeks (correction)

Because my editor was unable to review my work prior to the last post, I was fact-checked in arrears.  In addition to the all the other activities, Rod is also taking:


Sailing:     The school offers a very reasonable program that gets them 3 hours of sailing on Saturday's at the Dun Laoghaire (pronounced "Dun Leary") harbour.  They sail small boats around the harbour and eventually they'll end up in the Irish Sea.  It's only about 10 minute drive from the house and Rod could even walk down to the DART train and take that a few stops if needed.  I'll work on getting some pictures.

Golf:  Also through the school, he's taking golf lessons once a week.  We picked up some old clubs and did a little re-gripping one evening.  Nothing like a little father/son bonding in an enclosed room with a little mineral spirits in the air to make for an enjoyable time.

Here are the school pictures for the boys.  Our very good friend Deb, who has been taking Rod and JJ's school pictures for years, will probably  be wondering how they got reasonable pictures out of these two.  Not sure any threats were made to get the pictures, but JJ told us they were not to smile too much!  We've been told that this is an off-year for taking pictures at the girls school.  Yes, you heard that right, they only want pictures of their kids every other year.  Seemed a bit bizarre, but we're going to have to get our own camera out and get Grace in her school jumper and pinafore.

I'll get the other two spotlighted in an upcoming post!

Rod's Last Couple of weeks

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the oldest Rames child. So busy that Rod actually began to question the number of things he had going and whether he should give some up. Let's start with the biggest event:

Confirmation: From the AmericanCatholic.org website, "Confirmation is a Catholic Sacrament of mature Christian commitment and a deepening of baptismal gifts. It is one of the three Sacraments of Initiation for Catholics. It is most often associated with the gifts of the Holy Spirit."

In our parish in Redmond, Confirmation is celebrated MUCH later. It happens in high school when the kids are well into their teens. It's a bit different in Ireland. I can't say I know the answer as to why they do it differently, but it happens in the last year of Primary school (6th Class). The preparation for Confirmation is something that happens during the year and it is a pretty big part of their preparation for Secondary School (Jr. and Sr. High). Rod and class were confirmed on the 8th of March. This is a very special day for them not only for celebrating the sacrament, but they received the day off of school. Rod was a bit nervous and couldn't sleep the night before. He was worried that the Monsignor was going to ask him questions about St. Robert, his chosen name. Robert is the name of his Great Uncle, his very good friend in Redmond, and the confirmation name of his Grandpa. To his relief, no questions were asked. Here's an interesting link to St. Robert Bellarmine. Like all of us, he had his faults.

Right Reverend Monsignor Enda Lloyd officiated.

Rod's Confirmation sponsor was Colin Holmes. Colin is the son of some friends we met in Dublin and lives a few miles away. Martha and Colin's mom, Phoebe are as thick as thieves. Colin provides significant video game mentorship to Rod, so we figured spiritual mentorship couldn't be far behind.

And not only did Rod get the day off,

siblings of those being confirmed get the day off to celebrate with their families. JJ and Grace were very happy with this development as was Joe who had a rare mid-week day off.

We celebrated that evening at Rod's favorite restaurant in Dublin (Yo Thai). It's a teppanyaki where they cook the food on grills in front of you and do tricks with the food and entertain as they make it. It was a wonderful time.

Hurling: Rod is also participating in a few sports at this time. In one of my earlier posts, I talked about hurling and Rod had his first match. It was during the week, so Dad didn't get to go, but we did get a few pictures. We're planning on getting to a real hurling event on St. Patrick's day as they will play a big match in Croake Park where all the county teams vie to get to the championship.

Rugby: The rugby season continues. The team has struggled the last few matches, but Rod is still enjoying his time on the Old Belvedere U13 team. There is a weekend trip to Sligo coming up and Joe and Rod will be heading up for a weekend.

Swimming: The kids have also gotten back into swimming. Rod is doing very well, having moved up a few lanes since starting as his strokes have improved.

It wasn't all fun. Rod also has taken responsibility for doing the lawn, the old fashioned way. We weren't real excited about buying a mower here and our garden is very small, so we picked up an old fashioned push mower and Rod is keeping the lawn like his hair, short! And with spring seemingly upon us in Dublin, the grass has begun to grow.