St. Patrick's Day!

Happy Paddy's Day!
Today Jenny and I made croissant french toast with maple syrup and banana for breakfast, very yummy! And whilst we ate we watched youtube videos of the Dapper Dans and Frozen parodies.
We got ready to head out and applied temporary tattoos of shamrocks and Irish flags to match our Disney Patrick's day t-shirts!
We set off to watch the parade by St. Patrick's cathedral and on the way spotted many people with step ladders heading to the same place, utterly amazed that people actually do bring ladders, Ann-Marie at work was right (although not about the baby's first ladder!).
We walked past 8 coaches all labelled with paper signs saying they were for Louisiana State University "the marching golden band from tiger land!" With each bus having a register of which pupils were on which bus. There were easily over 150 people in this one band!
We found a spot which was pretty good until an annoying family stood next to us and kept pushing in.
After about half an hour waiting the parade finally came round our side of town. We saw the lord mayor in a golden carriage, lots of floats on bicycles and hand pulled sculptures that told the history of Ireland from Saint Patrick himself to the Celts and Vikings, from the Book of Kells and up to the Celtic Tiger boom.
Quite sad then, really, that the highlights of the parade were actually all the American marching bands. We cheered loudest for the Louisiana golden band of LSU, but there was also Coronado, Illinois, Canada, Queens and a few others with cheerleaders, flag wavers and baton twirlers. All extremely impressive and we decided we should go to the States to watch the american marching band grand nationals!
After the parade we made our way through the crowds to find a place for lunch. Several of the places we wanted to go were way too packed so we settled instead for the cafe in the National Gallery which was lovely and peaceful.
After lunch we walked to the river to the chq building where there were a few Irish food stalls and a beer court and music but you had to pay to enter and we weren't that bothered about drinking we just wanted live music.
We left and walked back up into town passing a fun fair on the way and we came through Temple Bar which looked like a sea of green throbbing and waving all down the street, insanely busy!
We bought stuff for tea in Dunnes and went to Fallon & Byrne deli store and got a birthday cake for Jen (she chose chocolate as there was a sign saying 'happy take the day off Lent day' so we decided it was ok for me to eat chocolate!) and some peanut butter pop tarts for breakfast.
We then popped to the Disney Store to say hi to people and so Jenny could have a look around then we waited for Luke to finish.
As he was running late we went home first to start tea and when he came home we watched Monsters University with our cake which we all enjoyed.
Today I am grateful for my one and only Patrick's day off in Ireland so that I got to experience the sights before I leave.