I had an unexpectedly awesome St. Patrick’s Day in Athens. The two guys that I spend most of my time with here are from Holland and Britian, so the Dutch guy doesn’t care about St. Patrick and the British guy rolls his eyes at the mention of anything Irish. Greece is something like 98% Greek Orthodox, so they’re not big on celebrating Irish Catholic saints.

Strangely enough, St. Patrick’s Day seems to be more popular in the US than anywhere in Europe, but one thing we’re definitely good at is coopting holidays from other countries and turning them into an excuse to go drinking! (I’ve got Cinco de Mayo marked on the calendar!)

Regardless, I was determined to find a new place to go that wasn’t full of sailors and cheap hookers, so I dragged Stuffie up to Syntagma Square with me. Our original plan was to find Coloniki (sp?) but we ended up wandering around downtown Athens for a while without running into any huge flashing signs to point us in the right direction. A light rain had started by this point in time, so the cobblestone on the roads and sidewalks was very slippery. Stuffie almost fell over a couple of times, but somehow we soldiered on. Eventually, we decided to rely on a fallback tactic of finding a fun looking crowd that looks like they know what they’re doing and following them. It was slim pickings though, and after a few minutes of searching the only group that presented itself was a big group of Russian tourists walking along yammering excitedly in Russian. We followed them around for a little while, but they seemed to be more interested in taking blurry pictures of old Greek ruins getting rained on than finding a cool bar, so we eventually bailed. We walked down a small maze of alleyways and ended up somewhere near Plaka. Just when all hope seemed lost, we stumbled across the James Joyce bar.

As you might expect, the James Joyce bar was your typical Irish joint. Approximately every single American in Athens was there tonight, because there were so many people packed into this bar you were scared to breathe too deeply since somebody might fill the space. The majority of the crowd was American, either students studying abroad or visiting for spring break, but we did meet one Irish chick, a few greek locals, and a dude from Hungary.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to escape from our fellow computer dorks. When we finally pushed our way up to the bar and got drinks, sitting right beside us was the only Irish chick in the whole place who (as it turned out) also worked for Microsoft in Europe. She was there with her Hungarian boyfriend, who also worked at Microsoft in Europe, and who didn’t seem to be too thrilled that she wanted to talk to us more than to him.

Other notable people we met included a really annoying drunk dude from New York who was majoring in political science (”majoring in traveling abroad for a year” as he put it), a submariner in the Greek navy (the greeks have a navy??), and a cute local greek girl that I ended up talking to for about an hour before discovering she was only 18 years old! That threw me for a loop since I was used to people being 21+ in the US, but I’m not complaining.

In summary, I got quite drunk, had a great time, and got a cool plastic green top hat to wear!