So that's what Irish ex-pats feel like on St. Patty's Day in the States?

Well, not quite for sure, but it was a just slightly tweaked experience, if only in its seemingly forced-gratuitousness-yet-ultimately-ignored sort of way.

I went to the premiere of Aoife and Emma's short plays tonight at the Bank of Ireland Theatre on the campus of the NUI Galway. They plays, two original shorts produced by the company that Aoife and Emma are founding members of, were brilliant, by the way. Aoife directed both, Emma acted in both. But that's an aside for now.

Afterwards, we went to the "College Bar", which is, in fact, a bar that's right on the campus, next to the theatre. The campus is very much isolated from the city pub scene, so think of it as like a student union, but with beer (any Wisconsin grads reading this, think of it as like your student union, but without the lake).

Anyways, up on the walls surrounding the bar were red, white and blue balloons and streamers. There were two large, flat panel TVs on the wall above the bar, and a large projection screen at the end. All three were looping a video which kept projecting "4th of July" in large, cartoonishly star-spangled letters, followed by clips of fireworks and assorted images from around the US, the first of which was unmistakeably, in a paradoxically intriguing twist to my observation basis, the Chicago river, dyed bright green for St. Pat's.

For what its worth, I did not notice any particularly pro-American stuff in any other places around town. I suspect the college bar did it out of respect to the very large portion of the student body that are American. Not like the other day when a quick look around Shop Street revealed that about every fifth person had a Canadian flag painted on their face.