We aren't sure if it is the Irish, or their laws or the culture, but they really don't take advantage of the opportunities to sell stuff like Americans do.
And as per my usual 80 percent comments, I'm not passing some normative judgement, it is just an observation. And a bit of a relief from all of the American consumerism.
So according to the paper, the Dublin Chamber of Commerce estimates 120,000 over-seas visitors will visit the capital over the bank holiday weekend. This year's spend is projected to be about 50 million Euro.
What is crazy is that they don't really seem to be taking advantage of it.
Perhaps it is just a holiday for adults and for some "craic" but we were a couple of families with kids (and a little money) hoping for some family friendly craic.
As said, we didn't find it in Dublin yesterday, in our attempt to avoid the crowd, and today we wanted to head down to experience the small-town St. Patrick's Day festival.* So, we headed down to Bray!
Bray is gorgeous.
We got there and I had completely read and re-read the schedule of events for the St. Patrick's Day Festival in Bray. There were several events hourly including story telling about snakes, acrobats, Irish Dancing, a live game of "Snakes and Ladders" and some music! This, on top of rides by the sea.
The problem? Nothing about the festival was apparent, at least initially.
We walked to the main street of the town--which was darling and bustling--but no event was obvious and no one seemed to either a) be going to the events or b) know about the events. One woman I asked sort of tut tutted at us and said that it would all be "on" tomorrow.
I was with Johnny (the others stopped in a shop to look around) looking for the snake thing which was apparently at Ulster Bank, but when I saw Ulster Bank it simply did not seem possible. Then I saw a little kid holding a plastic snake and followed him!
The event was, in fact, at Ulster Bank. There were about 30 kids and their parents and a couple of HUGE snakes. We had, apparently, missed the story of how St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.
Once done with that we headed down to the Church of the Redeemer where we were supposed to see a fire eater, acrobats and Irish Dancing.
We were early and started to catch on to the pattern. There were three female organizers wearing super nice green jackets with the logo of the festival. They were members of the city council who had organized the festival. There was also a guy on stilts who was apparently marking the event space, thank God because later when we would ask people "Where is the design center" (the location of the life-size snakes and ladders game) people on the street literally didn't know.
The church was not one of those ancient beautiful Irish ones (although it was nice, but again, it seemed like a missed opportunity, and in all honesty, the steps were filthy (which is all good--again, I'm imagining any event like this in America where the goal is to make a ton of cash).
The businesses along the street were open but so was traffic, so the streets weren't particularly pedestrian-friendly.
There were no booths out, no businesses announcing their wares with little tents outside or bright sale signs, or Irish music or anything.
We waited around at the steps when out comes the fire eater (in the middle of a crowd if Irish Dancers and their "Dance Moms" milling about waiting for their time to dance.
He was pretty awesome but the Irish crowd couldn't care less (and the crowd was quite small). The organizers didn't really announce him, nor did they shoo away the other performers to give him center stage. Also, the speakers worked intermittently and didn't play Irish music.
He literally had to urge people on to cheer for him!
And then came the "acrobats" (really just a guy and a gal whose act was him lifting her into odd and readily detectable, from the grimaces on his face, uncomfortable positions).
We waited around to get our faces painted while the Irish Dancers got set up. They first did one dance in the street (I guess the tradition is to "stop traffic") and then they moved into the little area in front of the church.
The dancers were fantastic. I have a few videos that I will post later. Apparently the troop was heading to an international competition in Boston and one gal was number 2 in the world last year so she only danced for a bit, not wanting to risk hurting herself.
We then headed down the street looking for the life-size snakes and ladders game (we had to stop at a local juice shop to get lunch -- again, not that I'm complaining, just thinking about the missed opportunity of having food booths at a festival!).
I was expecting something like one of those life size chess games at a Renaissance festival.
No. Again, we couldn't find the location, despite asking locals, and, when we did, the "board" was about 3x the size of a normal board, barely big enough for a toddler.
We headed back up to see the music and discovered this:
They were playing John Phillips Sousa and there was no crowd whatsoever.
We headed down toward the sea to grab a quick pint and check out the rides. I had heard all about the Harbor Bar (according to guidebooks it is the "best bar in the world"). It probably was, particularly for adults on a weekend night, but we were told that the bar had just changed hands (!) and that they were in the process of revamping.
It was darling inside, but empty.
We headed back to the Hibernian, had a pint, played a couple of rounds of Hearts and watched Wales cream England to ruin their chance for a grand slam in the six nations rugby tournament.*
Then we walked along the beach for a bit and headed to the rides.
The rides were great and much cheaper than the day before at Merrion Square so the kids had a blast.
*I think there was a bit of family-craic in Merrion Square today, we were just off by a day.
*Ireland sucked this year only really beating Wales so the Irish were keen on England loosing. You could hear cheers throughout the beach whenever Wales would score.
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