New Year’s eve, it’s like marmite. You either love the thought of a party and new beginnings or you hate the crowds, the anticlimax and the homicidal rage that occurs when you try and get a taxi. This is all before mentioning the stress of boxing off a midnight kiss.
Me? I’m all for making memories, no matter what time of year it is. To see in the start of 2015 I decided to grab ‘me one’ and get a quick half an hour flight over to the Emerald Isle and avoid the ‘same old, same old’ of town.
It was boss.
The one thing Liverpool lacks at New Year is any sort of city-wide celebration. Unless you have tickets for town or one of your mates has taken the brave decision to host a house party then your choices are pretty much restricted to staying in bed reading your kindle and purposely falling asleep before midnight. Bah humbug. Dublin will stand for no such shenanigans, there’s no limping in of the New Year there, new years start with a bang and of course, a lot of craic.
The New Year Festival 2015 was a celebration across the city of all the amazing arts and culture in Ireland. There were amazing light show projections on the buildings, design exhibitions, history tours and it all culminated on New Year’s eve with a light procession all through the city centre and a huge concert right near the world famous Trinity College. We even got to go to a poetry slam, which was a bit like a rap battle but with less disprecting people’s mothers.
We got to see James Vincent McMorrow (Higher Love) and have Kodaline (High Hopes) count in the New Year. The atmosphere was indescribable and it definitely won’t be a night I’ll forget any time soon. Watch the Kodaline High hopes video on Youtube… it’s a tear jerker.
On New Years Day, the understanding people at the Morrisson Hotel (just a short walk from the Ha’penny bridge on the banks of the River Liffey) served breakfast all the way up to midday so we could have a lie in.
The Ha’penny bridge
Then rather than the traditional hangover cure of lying in bed questioning your life decisions and generally dying we took a tour around the Guinness factory and did the hop on hop off bus tour (because no visit to Dublin would be complete without a trip to the Guinness storehouse). There are two hop on hop off bus tours; the red city explorer ones which you see franchised all over the world and the green Dublin Tour buses – deffo get the green ones if you go. The drivers do the commentary themselves rather than a pre-recording and they’re all hilarious. Ours let a few people off to take pictures of the Oscar Wilde statue and then pretended to drive off on them “What did you think was gonna happen yer eejits!” (He did stop and let them back after a minute or two of teasing, don’t worry!).
Ta-dahhh
If topping up the tank is more your idea of a hangover cure you can of course visit the Temple Bar area which is buzzing at all times of the day and night – expect to pay a little bit more for drinks here though…
Huge thankyou to Failte Ireland (pronounced a little bit like Vulture Island) for putting on such an amazing NYF Festival, I’ll deffo be making a return visit very soon…
XOXO
