And we're all off to Dublin in the green
It's a funny old world. For years the places to celebrate St Patrick's Day were New York, Boston, San Francisco, in fact just about anywhere apart from Ireland's capital city Dublin.
That's despite the fact that March 17 is supposed to celebrate the man who brought Christianity and drove the snakes out of Ireland. Famously he demonstrated the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost to the heathen king with the aid of a three-leafed shamrock.
Now St Paddy is the focus of a week-long festival in Dublin. This, however, is only one small reason for visiting what has become, in recent years, one of Europe's most dynamic capital cities.
After decades of decay, European money has poured in over the last 20 years. As a result tourists and locals now throng the streets to enjoy the stylish shops, stunning restaurants, cutting-edge nightclubs, traditional and rock music, not forgetting the pubs. Not that the pubs ever went away, they've always been the focus of Dublin culture.
That culture is built on words. The Irish are probably the world's greatest conversationalists and they've produced some of the greatest writers in the English language - Joyce, Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Wilde, Beckett, even Bram Stoker the author of 'Dracula'. And it was Dublin that was the first place to combine tourism, culture and pleasure in the form of the literary pub crawl.
By the way, if you ask a Dubliner what a place is like and you think he says: "The crack's great." Don't worry. He's not recommending a drug den. "Craic" is basically the Irish Gaelic word for "fun" and more. It's a word you'll hear a lot in Dublin.
When To Go
Dublin's not the place to go for a suntan. If you turn brown, that'll just be rust. The city does tend to dampness. It's a place spared extremes of temperature. Snow is uncommon through the winter and 70 degrees Fahrenheit is a warm summer day. That said, from June to August is the tourist season when the days are long and the nights are short. Although the opposite is true in winter, that's when the streets are freer of tourists and prices are lower. And the pubs are always warm, dry and welcoming!
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