I’ve never celebrated St. Patrick’s day a day in my life. I’ve always thought that a specific day to drink alcohol was never really smart but I must say, I’m chowing down on a bit of crow right now. My day started like the rest, here in Brussels with dragging myself out of bed and eating a very meager breakfast. Today was Sunday which meant it was the last day that the nine of us had full use of our bus to take us wherever we would like to go. Given our time and resources, we decided to take a two hour bus ride to the Chimay monastery to learn more about this popular Belgian lager.

Seeing how this monastery is where monks live, we weren’t able to tour the actual brewery or the monastery because they don’t open it to the public. Luckily our trip wasn’t in vain, as they had a separate visitors center where we could learn more about their brewing process and followed it up with a free tasting.

Chimay has four different types of beer, three if which are distributed across the world.

Once we got back to Brussels we took some time to gather ourselves and rendezvous again for a quick kebab and go off to celebrate St. Patty’s Day. At 5:30, we entered one of the few Irish pubs, O’Reilly’s to be specific and started to celebrate the holiday with good company and good music. As the hours passed, the nine of us got an extremely pleasant surprise as the Paris group found us and joined us for the rest of the evening. It didn’t take long for the shots to pour and several Irish car bombs to be drank.

The rest of the night consisted of quite a bit more drinking and several rounds of karaoke. One of the best things about being here is the cultural melting pot that the city has. That night, I met an Irish woman, Stacy, who was from a town outside of Dublin and is currently studying in Brussels. She helped me and the rest of the group have a great time and showed us exactly what the holiday is about.