I-rish every day was St. Fratty’s Day at Vanderbilt

As an international student from the UK, I have already documented my experience at the rodeo, my horror at the lack of Pancake Day across the pond, and the difficulties I’ve faced navigating the fratosphere.

The crowning jewel of Spring semester partying is St. Fratty’s Day, the Saturday after St. Patrick’s Day which involves as much alcohol as it does green clothing. In other words, way too much. That I survived the day is honestly a miracle, and one I felt was deserving of true Tab style documentation. 

Here are a few things I learnt yesterday.

Girls look great in green

On every front porch, of every frat house in Commodore Country, girls in green clothing took over. Different shades of green accented different slogan tees and each pun I saw was worse than the one that came before. Social media was also overwhelmed by the influx of so startling a color.

We posed in groups and individually, we selfie-d with best friends and strangers, we snapchat storied the highs and the lows. We posted them all, too distracted by green punch to bother with editing levels of brightness, or to be even slightly selective with what we were sharing.

The horror of waking up on Sunday morning and realizing you posted 30 pictures to your Facebook page the day before

SFD means its time to raise the Insta game

St. Fratty’s Day brings out the best and worst in everybody. Am I impressed with Nora’s ‘gram? Hell yes!

Do I also feel a little sad when I remember how long this took her? You bet.

150% insane

Temporary tattoos are your new best friend

Nora bought 120 temporary tattoos. Nora was everybody’s best friend.

I sham-rocked 5 of Nora’s 120 tattoos on various parts of my body.

Removing them involved lots of strong scotch tape and hot water. Sunday morning was rough.

4 out of 5 of my temporary tattoos are pictured in this incredibly Irish image. See if you can spot them all!

I know what you’re thinking about day drinking

If you go out at 10am, you’ll definitely be back in time to get a good night sleep, right? Wrong.

The Christian frat, BYX, hosted a sober “Green Rave” which took place in the evening. BYX parties are amazing – girls from my dorm were out until the early hours for a truly spiritual Sunday morning coming down.

I had every intention of going to this event but didn’t make it past 6pm. Maybe next year!

I have spent every St. Patty’s Day until now living pretty much on Ireland’s door-step.

Little did I know, the best place to celebrate my Irish heritage was actually all the way across the Atlantic, on an American college campus.

Carolina sports a sham-rocking headband

Did you notice I just slipped my Irish heritage in there, like every single person I talked to did, in every single conversation I had yesterday?

Here’s to everyone being “a wee bit Irish”, and to making it through Sunday afternoon.