Canadiana Backpackers Blog

So just what is St. Patrick’s Day? Very simply, it is the National Day of Ireland. It is a banking holiday in Northern Ireland and a public holiday in Eire (the Republic of Ireland).

And oddly enough, it is also a public holiday on the Isle of Montserrat and the Canadian Province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

In the rest of Canada, North America and Australia it is not a recognized holiday; nonetheless, they celebrate the occasion. Boy, do they ever celebrate!

Apparently, the first St, Patrick’s Day Parade was held in Boston in 1761 followed by New York in 1762. But the longest, continually running parade has been held in Francophone Montreal (of all places) where it has been an annual event since 1824!

You don’t actually have to be of Irish heritage to celebrate he occasion. At the hostel, Backpackers usually wear something green then retire to a pub to drink green beer and generally abuse their livers.

This year the hostel arranged a trip to a three story University crowd pub called the Madison. It is a little out of the way being close to he trendy movie star frequented Yorkville area of Toronto. From all reports it was quite an evening.

A young lady who shall remain nameless (actually it was Emily, from Oz) got a little tipsy; a lot lost and was driven back to the hostel by the Transit Police!

I asked her what happened and she said she got lost on the Subway and started to cry (she was bawling, actually). The subway personnel were more than helpful (I’m sure her Aussie accent helped tremendously) and called the Transit Cops who drove her home.

Anyhow, just another St. Paddy’s Day here at the Canadiana.

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Rocco from South Africa and Kelly from Oz pretending to be Irish.

Sally and Kelly (both from Oz)

Sally, Emily and Kelly – all from OZ!

Lourens (from South Africa); Doughy from Ireland; and Matt from Oz.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 9:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.