The city turns green...

The St Patrick’s Day parade begins at 11am, so we were up reasonably early to get up to Midtown and find a good spot to watch. After a cupcake based breakfast (seriously, Hedy has a cupcake problem!), we took the subway up to 59th and walked along the south side of Central Park. I had seen the barriers go up the day before and figured that this was a good place to get a spot with a clear view. There were already lots of people around, many clad in green ready to watch, and there were green street vendor’s carts on every corner. You could buy green hats, green t-shirts, ‘kiss me I’m Irish’ badges, giant green trumpets, all manner of green beads with crazy green pendants, sparkly shamrock sunglasses and lots more. I refrained from making any purchases – Hedy and I were already sporting our very tasteful St Patrick’s Day t-shirts that I had picked up a few days earlier. We found a spot a couple of blocks up where we could get to the front and have a clear view. The parade didn’t make it this far until a while after 11, but after that it seemed to be never ending! It started with a few political characters, presumably including the city mayor, followed by some uniformed troops who were given a warm welcome by the crowds. After this, it was a continuous stream of police officers and firemen in their dress uniforms and accompanied by their kilted pipe bands. I know, it was a real chore to watch the shiny buttoned lovelies walk past us. Occasionally, these uniformed groups were interspersed by school marching bands and baton twirlers, and the occasional groups of excited civilians marching under the name of their ‘Emerald Society’ or something similar. We also spotted a few groups from Ireland – some random social groups or representatives and some from bands and from the Irish Guard.
By 12.30, our feet had frozen to the floor (we were stood in the chilly shade) and believe it or not, we had seen enough firemen. We headed downtown along the route of the parade. I noticed a few more pipe bands that were playing ‘Scotland the Brave’ as we went, which I tried to excuse as they were ‘pipe bands’ after all. But… they were all called something like ‘The Emerald Pipe Band’, and it was St Patrick’s Day… so can that be excused? I am hopeful that someone can still tell me that there is an Irish song that sounds just like Scotland the Brave, but I couldn’t help finding it a bit annoying.
We eventually headed down a side street by the Rockefeller Center, and popped into a bizarre buffet style restaurant for lunch. It sold pretty much every kind of food – Chinese, Mexican, Barbeque and so on – and we had a selection of items that were then weighed to determine the price. We sat in the window watching the passers-by going to and from the parade. My favourite group was a family of about 8, each and every one wearing a matching cream Aran ‘sweater’ – these seem to be the alternative to green for the ‘Irish’ here. I actually thought these were more of a Scottish thing, but I stand corrected – they are traditionally from the Aran Isles off Western Ireland. And, obviously, are worn by all Irish people all of the time….
Hedy and I had learned our lesson by Tuesday with regards to our ability to last all day. As a city, New York is overwhelming, and we had both found that being out all day invariably rendered us too tired to enjoy our evening. So after lunch, we headed back downtown to the apartment for a rest. What a pair of youthful party animals we are… Both of us flaked out for two hours, and didn’t head back up town until about 4.30. Having seen Irish bars on every corner all week, we suddenly found ourselves unable to find any! We walked several blocks down and one across to find one and fought our way through the drunken crowd to find the bar and a place to stand. After paying true Dublin prices for a beer, we stood bleary eyed watching the madness. Eventually a New Yorker called Brian approached us for a chat – he was nice enough, but within 10 minutes we were bored of him and he didn’t seem to be willing to go away, despite the uncomfortable silences. He had advised us that midtown was not a good place to go out, and that we should head downtown, so we told him we were taking his advice and left…. one block down we went into the next Irish bar we saw. This one contained firemen and marines, and for some reason seemed a little more interesting to us, so Hedy started a tab and we remained put. You may be surprised to know that we didn’t chat to any firemen, and only spoke to the marines to have photos taken. We spoke to a few Spanish guys, who's English was quite broken, but one of whom we caught trying to take a photo of me twice… er, weird… They didn’t believe that two people would be from London and Texas, therefore concluded that I was not a Londoner. In the words of Katherine Tate: Bovered? NO.
We may have eventually made our way over to investigate the drunken firefighters, but got chatting to a couple of others guys as a result of a common annoyance – the rather large, rather old, rather drunk couple at the bar, who were apparently trying to eat each others faces. It was like train wreck television – repulsive, horrifying, the stuff of nightmares… but you just couldn’t look away. The two guys turned out to be very friendly and we chatted away with them until they left – unlike us they had work the next day so couldn’t be out all night. Hedy actually exchanged numbers with one of them – Adam, who played rugby at college so was interesting to chat to him about that – and took the other guys card (he was called Skip – short for Skipper… yes, people apparently really do have names like that!) - so she will hopefully get some company for some more of the evenings that she is there…We left shortly afterwards, stopping briefly to accost a group of marines for a photo (those uniforms really are quite fetching!) and heading back on the subway. We spent the whole way back chatting with two young lads from Brooklyn, who were fascinated by both of our accents. I was more interested in the fact that one of them was wearing a Celtic FC away shirt – I asked if he knew what it was, and he said ‘an Irish soccer team in Glasgow’ .. fair play to him, he didn’t seem to know more and had never seen them play, but he was pretty much on the nose! He proceeded to tell me that his Grandmother was Irish and that she said he looked like a typical ‘dark Irishman’ and asked what I thought. Erm… I just said yes! No idea what he meant, but he had the appearance of someone with a mixed racial ancestry to me and certainly not an Irish one!
We stopped at the store on the way home to buy some breakfast, and whilst complaining that we had not seen any green beer anywhere, we were accosted ourselves by a man who had heard our accents. We chatted to him for a while, and he eventually gave Hedy his card in exchange for a little kiss – she has concluded that I am some kind of lucky charm for her. Maybe this should be the reason that we need to both go and live in New York? Our final stop was Grays Papaya for a hotdog, which we chomped on as we wondered home, looking up the Empire State Building which was glowing bright green in the night sky…