We’re a strange bunch.
It’s summertime and everyone seems to be in a great mood.
Perhaps the reason that so many people are in good form is because they have a holiday abroad planned. It just brightens your whole mood.
You could be in work or college or school, but as long as you’ve got something to look forward to, it all gets a little bit easier.
And when Irish people go away, we do a lot of the normal stuff. We go swimming, we go shopping, we eat out. We have a great time.
But there’s some stuff that we do while we’re away that nobody else in the world does.
Here’s just a few of them.
The pint in the airport
At this stage, it’s basically mandatory. You have to have a pint in the airport. Bonus points if you upload a picture of it to Facebook with the caption “be rude not to” accompanied by 23 emojis. Like so:
Looking for things we already have in Ireland
This is just bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. You’ve been excited to get out of Ireland for ages, and the first thing you do is look for things you had the day before you left.
You could be in Portugal, in the middle of a grocery store, and for some crazy reason someone you’re with will feel obliged to say “Oooh, they have Lucozade here.” You know where else they have Lucozade? IN IRELAND. Where you live. This also applies to anyone who has bought a dairy milk in a foreign country. What is your deal?
Doing nothing
This might not be an exclusively Irish thing, but it is a mind-boggling habit nonetheless. You’ve traveled halfway across the world, to a country full of potential new adventures and activities, but chances are, you’ve spent so much money on your accommodation that you don’t really want to leave it. It could be a hotel, an apartment or a villa, but Irish people can have a tendency to turn into homebirds, when they’re away from home, if that makes sense…
Lays
Come on people, they’re just Walkers. They taste basically the exact same. Maybe it’s the sun that makes them taste 500 times better. Either way, Irish people are obsessed.
Getting a ball
You haven’t played a proper game of football in a long time. Your fitness is out the window, and your body has definitely seen better days. Yet, once we touch foreign soil, we get this urge to buy the first spherical object we see. Be it a football, a basketball, or one of those really light beachballs they sell for like €6 at a stall, you better believe that we’re buying it.
Maybe you think that playing on a beach will make you look like Ronaldinho in his prime. It won’t.
Wearing something floral
We just love it. A shirt, shorts, a little bucket hat. As long as it’s got flowers on it, we’re all over it. Maybe go all out with all three at the same time. Feck it, you’re on it holidays.
Being able to say “feck it, I’m on holidays”
Consider this the Irish person’s ‘get out of jail free’ card for the duration of their trip. Having a second dinner? You’re on holidays. You’ve just inhaled your third packet of lays? You’re on holidays. You’ve consumed copious amounts of alcohol for nine days straight. You are on your holidays! Anything goes.
Tanning.
Now, we know this doesn’t sound like something that only Irish people do, but we mean the way that Irish people to do it. If we come home from our holidays without being burnt to a crisp (a lays crisp, perhaps) we are bitterly disappointed. We need to get every single drop of sun that we can, or we may as well not have gone in the first place.
Finding an Irish bar the second you get there
This is essential. You’re in a beautiful city that you know very little about, and for some strange reason, you’d like to keep it that way. Instead of diving in head first and embracing this foreign culture that you may never get to see again, you head straight to ‘Paddy O’Mahoney’s’ a place that is less Irish than the word “mum”. They have posters of Ronan O’Gara and Roy Keane on the wall, and they sell Guinness and fish and chips, but it’s not really Irish at all.
Will that stop you from going every night? Absolutely not.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
