St Patty's Day Recap

So, St Patty's Day was pretty fun, as I'm sure you've probably guessed. Not many of my colleagues have done anything to celebrate it before, but I talked it up a pretty good deal so I managed to convince my groupmates for our accounting project to go out for some Guiness. It wasn't really that hard to do; after all, we don't have class on Thursdays. I'm pretty sure any town, village, or camp on the planet with more than a few residents has an Irish pub of some sort; Bologna, thankfully, is no different and offers numerous choices. As so often happens, a quick beer turns into two or three, etc etc. Before I knew it, we'd hit up about four different Irish pubs all around the city center.

 I kept telling everyone about green beer and no one believed me, but lo and behold, the first place we went to was offering it to patrons and I just had to get some. Although there were quite a few people out celebrating even when we arrived at 4pm, it was obvious this is still a fairly novel festival for the Italians (not nearly as many Irish descendants here). Case in point: the bartender pouring my beer produced a little vial of green food coloring, and put a few drops in. That should have been plenty, but obviously inexperienced, she failed to mix the beer (thereby dispersing the color) and instead chose to add a few more drops. I thought to myself 'Oh wow, this isn't going to be pretty tomorrow'. But wait, that's not all! Staring blankly at the drops of food coloring suspended and unmixed in the cold beer, she apparently was still unsatisfied and proceeded to *literally* unscrew the cap of the food coloring and DUMP THE ENTIRE BOTTLE in my pint of beer. She accompanied the spectacular feat by saying 'At this rate, we're going to run out of food coloring pretty quick!' Yeah, you are. I present to you my non-FDA approved beer:

Yeah, I know. Looks like a Guinness. At least I didn't spill any on me; that would have been a travesty.

So we spent a few hours there in our little accounting group, and were eventually joined by some more friends from class. Notice the distinctly non-toxic appearance of their beverages.

Here I am with a proper Guiness, and some of my accounting groupmates.

After the first place, we joined up with some more people at the next bar on the list, then another pub with some more friends, and then another... you get the picture. Sounds like a lot, but Italians tend to drink really slow and if you end up having just one beer at each place, it's really not a lot. I ended up going home pretty early (aka midnight), and just relaxed and did some studying for the next few days. On Saturday night a bunch of us got together again at a friend's place for a little party, which is always nice because then you get your beers for 50 cents at the supermarket instead of four or five euros at the bar. I had enough for my share, and fell asleep for a while on a superbly comfortable couch. When I woke up, someone had just finished making pasta with pancetta. Can one wake up from a semi-drunken state any better way than that? I submit that one cannot. Parties tend to start late and go even later, so it was past daybreak by the time I got home, which meant I spent the better part of Sunday in bed.

For this week, we're more or less wrapping up the classes and preparing for exams after Easter. A lot of students are going back home for the holiday starting this week, so chances are it will be a pretty tame weekend. Those of us who will remain here have discussed doing a little dinner kind of like the one we did for Christmas, so hopefully that will pan out. Other than that I don't foresee much excitement, except that I won't have to sit in class for nine hours on Mondays so that will be freaking awesome. Until next time gentle readers!