This year, our high school marching band was invited to travel five thousand miles to the city of Dublin in Ireland to perform in not only a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Limerick, but also one in Dublin on March 17, 2014 – one that happens to be the third largest annual parade in the world, only behind the Rose Bowl New Year’s Parade and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Pageants and bands from around the world, including Germany, Estonia, Ireland, and the United States, performed in this display of fantastical colors and sounds. Our band happened to be surrounded by a high school marching band from Clover Hill, Virginia, a college brass and drum line corps from Germany, Louisiana State University’s Marching Band, and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s Marching Band. There were rumors that even Beyonce was in the crowd that day. Standing in wait for over two hours behind the stage was definitely worth all the screams, pictures, and high fives of an audience of over five hundred thousand people who traveled just as far to see this spectacle live.

Saint Patrick’s Day has been celebrated in Ireland for centuries, especially since he is considered the patron saint of Ireland. The day of March 17 officially became a public holiday in 1903, and the first St. Patrick’s Day Parade was held in 1931. From then on, Ireland has successfully utilized this phenomena in order to showcase the best of Ireland’s culture, most definitely fulfilling its original purpose “to offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebration in the world.” The first St. Patrick’s Day Festival debuted in 1996, gradually growing to be a five day long event by 2006. This has inspired the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day around the world, as many cities, such as New York, have their own extravagant festivities to pay homage to this Irish saint. I hoped to see the best that Ireland truly had to offer, to experience firsthand the intense patriotism and cultural fervor of the Irish during this grand celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, and to discover what it really meant to be Irish on this day.

I learned so much more about Irish culture in those few hours of marching two miles than I had learned in busing around for days about famous monuments. The sights, the sounds, the smells – it was a sensory overload of Irish culture. From the beer to the theatrics, it is vastly different from American culture. Their hospitality is beyond compare, and their attitude is one of much reverence towards musicians, as seen from the various concerts and dances held for the people. Additionally, their economy is a lot better than ours, as seen from the higher prices and greater generosity towards the poor. Even though our countries are so different in many ways – socially, politically, economically, culturally – we are incredibly similar as well. No matter where you go, people are people, each with their own feelings, lives, and worlds. This is something I have seen again and again and it never ceases to amaze me. There is really nothing like this experience; I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

Without this experience, I would not have been half as enriched as I have become this year. It was not just the food or the people, it was not just the friends and the music, it was the feelings I felt and the thoughts I thought. Like working out one’s physical body, a variety of environment and stresses is necessary for optimum mind growth, as one needs to always be constantly surprised for learning to occur. I learned that I still love travelling for this reason, whether with friends, family, or alone, as that time away from the daily struggles is incredibly beneficial to one’s health, mind, and soul.

This incredible experience unsurprisingly held much more significance than this. Each event one experiences in life, each person one meets, whether stranger or friend, has learning to contribute. One should not only surround himself with only smart people, or only people of a certain “elite” class for that matter, but also with an intellectually, culturally, ideologically diverse mass of individuals. They say most people die with their music inside them, with their songs unsung and their greatness incomplete. By reaching out to global events such as this St. Patrick’s Day Celebration in Dublin, Ireland, one is decreasing the amount of waste in not only his heart, but in the hearts of those around him, by inspiring others to do the same.