Looking back now, did anything seem weird in the moment?
Not really. The people who were going to the parade were all just having a good time together. You could tell they all knew each other, they were friends. I did ask someone who was passing by where they were headed, and they said, “A parade,” but they described it with a term I wasn’t familiar with and I had no service so I couldn’t Google anything. I just had no knowledge.
I don’t know what else I could have learned. A lot of people commented and said, ‘This is why you learn about the history of a country before you go to the country,’ which is true to a sense. But I doubt most people are sitting down and reading the history book of different countries before they go to them. I actually was reading a historical fiction book I had started on the plane, because I like to learn a little bit before I go, but it was just about the potato famine. It didn’t cover the Orange Order.
Is there anything you would do differently next time? Has this experience changed the way that you post about places, or the types of research you think you might do?
I would think more about what I’m posting in terms of whether it’s accurate, like if I’m saying “this is an Irish parade,” then fact- checking and finding out if that’s true or not before I post it. It seems like the Irish people generally had a pretty good perception of it at the end. People were messaging me and calling me an Irish celebrity because I was all over the news and stuff, and they were all like, “you have to come back.” I also had maybe two people from the Orange Order reach out and say, “Oh, you should come to our next parade!”
I did not take them up on that.
