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I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year! The holidays were a bit crazy for us as they always are. A lot of travel. Three family Christmas celebrations, a Christmas party, a New Year’s party, and we got a new kitten!
But now back to Ireland . . . on my last honeymoon post, the Fellow, our new Canadian friends, and I were just heading down to a little side pub in Dublin.
When we got to the pub, we were the only ones there except for the bartender and two of his buddies.
The first ten minutes of the night were kind of rough. As I’m sure most of you know, the rest of the world often doesn’t think very kindly of Americans, and we ran into a bit of that there. The bartender took his time to get our drink order, and he was thoroughly unhappy with my request for a cup of tea.
“Could I have a cup of tea, please, if it’s not too much trouble?”
“I suppose you want milk with that?”
“If that’s ok?”
“”You have to drink it, not me.”
I never got the milk.
We chatted with the Canadians, and the bartender talked over us to them a bit, but the only thing we got were sidelong comments about Americans until I asked the Fellow if he wanted to leave.
I guess he wasn’t feeling too appreciative of the atmosphere either because he turned to the group at the end of the bar and told the fellows something along the lines of “I don’t come here and assume all Irishmen are drunk, angry @$$holes, so why do you think it’s ok to be rude to us about Americans?”
Sometimes you’ve just got to call out people and address things head on. It worked like a charm.
From that point on, the evening was enjoyable.The conversations wandered all over the place from current political climates, Irish and American politics, (We got kudos for winning the Revolutionary War!), and football and soccer teams.
It’s fascinating how much they all know about other countries’ histories and how in touch they are with their own history. They talked about battles their ancestors had fought like it was in the last decade, not hundreds of years ago.
At one point during the evening, one of the guys turned to me and said, “I want to ask you a question.” I was not prepared for his question at all. He asked, “What do you think of the Dixie Chicks?” Of all the things!! I said I liked them well enough, and he came back with another question: “What do you think of Bush?” I figured it was best to sidestep, so I told him I was too young to have an opinion. “Fair enough. What do you think about Trump?” As I’m sure you can imagine, that kicked the conversation off on a long side road!
We stayed until closing, chatting, drinking and laughing. We even got them to agree to snapping a quick picture with us before we all went our separate ways. 
