Matt and Kat Brown

Hello from the Emerald Isle! It’s St Patrick’s Day today, a national holiday and a day off for us. As I look out the window I can see lots of blue sky and sunshine, a good start to the day. We’ll be off soon to see the St Patrick’s Day parade and to join in the celebrations.

St Patrick’s Day is historically the Feast Day celebrating the Patron Saint of Ireland – St Patrick. These days it’s used as a day to celebrate all things Irish – the color green, shamrock and leprechauns and especially Irish stout and whiskey! Dublin makes a week long festival out of it with a fun fair, music and performances around the city and the big parade on St Patrick’s Day.

What we were looking forward to most about the festivities were the big fireworks that we had heard were part of the celebrations. Unfortunately we found out that the fireworks aren’t to be held in Dublin this year. By some strange backward thinking they’d moved the location for the fireworks to Cashel, Tipperary. Population Cashel: 11,000. Population Dublin: 1.2million…. hmmm.

We’ll be off to see the parade soon and will be sure to snap a few photos to share with you. It should be fun

Some St Patrick’s Day facts:

• While St Patrick’s Day is always on March 17th, the official celebration was moved by the Vatican this year to March 15th so that St Patrick’s Day wouldn’t fall in the Holy Week before Easter. The last time this happened was in 1940. (Secular celebrations of the day remain on the 17th)
• St Patrick was actually born in Britain. He was captured and sold into slavery to a sheep farmer in Ireland when he was 16. It was in Ireland that he came to a personal faith in God. He escaped when he was 22 and spent the next 12 years in a monastery. In his later years he felt God calling him to return to Ireland to convert the pagans. With his knowledge of the Irish language and culture, St Patrick communicated Christianity to the Irish in a way they readily understood and accepted. Over his 30 years of ministry in Ireland he saw many monasteries and churches built, planting the seeds of Christianity all throughout the country.
• Legend says that each leaf of the clover or shamrock has a meaning: the first is for hope, the second for faith, the third for love and the fourth for luck.
• The Irish flag is green, white and orange. The green symbolizes the people of the south, and orange, the people of the north. White represents the peace that brings them together as a nation.

An Irish toast :  “May your blessings outnumber, the shamrocks that grow, And may trouble avoid you wherever you go.”

I’ve been watching the construction of what I suspected was a new bridge over the river as I walk to work each day for the last 6 months and this week they’ve finally put up signs confirming that it is actually a bridge that they’re building. Unfortunately it’s not going to be finished until 2010, so I’m not sure whether we’ll still be around to enjoy it’s benefits.

It turns out that there is a big master plan for the development of this whole area, which used to be pretty scummy warehouses and docks. The link below gives a very cool interactive aerial view of the whole area:

• Dublin Docklands Interactive Aerial Map

On the map, our building is the big rectangular/square building with a grass courtyard in the middle, approximately halfway down the map on the left side, just to the left of the Convention Centre pin.

The Google offices are just off the right hand side near the top where the canal exits the map. The central city is just off the bottom.

Lots going on!