“Wanna go out tonight? There’s a cool event in the city centre.” I check the details of said event on the Vipsy app on my phone and proceed to reply to my friend “Yeah, why not. Let’s meet around 8 for prinks”. Before coming to Dublin this was a conversation that I could have only had on the weekends, at the very least on a Thursday. For sure not on a Monday afternoon.
I remember very clearly the second week that I was here, when the lectures started. I finally got to meet my Irish roommates who arrived at the apartment the night before. I just started my first classes and was still adjusting to the life in a new city trying to figure out how things worked. When I got home, after that first day of school, all I could think about was to just rest and be ready for day two.
I was therefore a bit surprised and really confused when, while I was in my room doing my things, I started hearing some music from the living room and the front door opening every five minutes to let people in.
Wait, are they having a party on a Monday? My confusion was growing exponentially as the apartment was starting to get busier and louder.
At last I figured out that they were not having a party; they were having what I would soon learn to be called “prinks” a cute word formed by contracting the term “pre-drinks”. I did not know the name, but the concept was familiar. Being a broke student, it makes sense to drink mostly at home, preventing to spend money on an overpriced cocktail in some club. But even after that realization I still could not wrap my head around the fact that it was the first day of the week. I mean, usually people party on the weekends, right? But they were definitely going out on a Monday and I would soon find out that no matter what day of the week it was, there was always a cool event in the city centre and that it was absolutely normal to start, and continue, the week like this.
It did not take me long to notice the major differences between the students’ nightlife in Dublin and the one at my home university in Switzerland. And to be honest, despite my initial perplexity, I was more than happy to adapt my habits.
Other than considering every night of the week as a good night to party, one thing that struck me was how early the nights would start and end. Prinks would start around 8 o’clock and sometimes everyone is out of the house and on the way to the club at 10 already. Starting this early, it is no surprise that people get home early too. I remember when one night while heading home, a girl commented that she could not believe that we stayed out that late, at around 3 am, a time that back home would be considered still quite early to leave.
While it was weird at the beginning, I ended up having to admit that it actually makes perfect sense to anticipate nights out like this. I think there are two main reasons that can explain this trend. First, because most Irish students don’t stay on campus during the weekends but go home to their families, people go out on weeknights, and that means that some might have class early in the morning. Falling asleep during a lecture is not something that one necessarily wants. Second, there are numerous deals to get into clubs and whatnot for a cheaper cover or even for free by going early. There are specific apps, like Vipsy, that allow anyone to get free passes and gives the guarantee of the cheapest drinks with the one condition of being there before a certain time. And this is something students, who usually do not have a lot of money, hardly say no to.
The nights out in the city are for sure really fun but for someone who does not want to stress with buses and taxis and spending a long time on the road just to get to places, there is a nice alternative right on campus that meets both criteria mentioned above: it is early and it is on a weekday.
In this case, the early opening does not depend on free entrances or other discounts but on the closing hours of the bar on campus, the NuBar, that every Tuesday night, hosts an event called the “Shite Night”. When I first heard of it, I did not realize that it was such a big thing among students here. It starts at 9pm and it ends at midnight and before trying it out, I was a bit sceptical about it. But it turned out that it is possible to have a great time in a few hours and still get home before 1am. It seems like they found the right formula to condense every single thing that makes what can seem a boring night out at the campus bar, a fun one.
Since I moved here I just had a glimpse of what nightlife for a student in Dublin looks like and there is still a lot that I don’t know about, but I think that now that I got used to the basics, I just have to continue to live it first-hand and enjoy the process of getting to know another way of life.
Evy Nadarajah
Dublin Insight 