Celebrating the Holidays Dublin Style

December was full of lots of celebrating! We celebrated Brian's birthday by having some friends over and then going out for a pub crawl (which involved crawling to only two pubs). I also took Brian out to dinner at an Irish restaurant where we had boxtys, which is a famous Irish dish- basically potato pancakes with different yummy fillings inside.

Brian and I also had our school/company Christmas parties this month. Apparently Christmas parties are huge over here because my party was like a wedding- we had a full dinner with a night of live bands, DJs, drinking and dancing. We also stayed overnight at a hotel in Gormanstown, which was a lot of fun. Brian had his Christmas party at a bar in Dublin- good food and drinks there as well.

We also had our friends Mike and Michelle here for the holidays. We did lots of touring and had some good nights out with traditional Irish music. Michelle was also able to come to my school for our Christmas play of Oliver Twist. It was unbelievable- the last two weeks before Christmas we hardly taught- just lots of practice for the play. It was all worthwhile because we did three very professional performances of the show and the boys were great. The costumes, lighting, singing and dancing were so good- I even played violin for a bunch of songs. I'll post some pictures of that soon (the best are the ones of the boys who are dressed as girls for the play - complete with wigs, make-up and dresses.) We also went on a day tour to the Wicklow Mountains with Michelle. Wicklow is about an hour south of Dublin- really pretty area.

For Christmas Eve we went to our Polish friend, Joanna's place. She had such great food and taught us the Polish traditions for Christmas Eve. Christmas Day we cooked a ham dinner and ate...and ate some more. Oh yeah, we also relaxed with some movies. New Year's Eve we are probably going to a party at my friend Rachel's apartment. We definitely have a ton of pictures to post, but we will probably get them up at some point next week. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!!!!!