When in doubt...Leprechauns!

I got to go to Dublin for work last week, which turned into about 50% work and 50% "a pint with the lads".  Dublin was great - lots of history, nice people, and enough pubs to last a lifetime.  The hotel I stayed in is actually an old Catholic schoolhouse that was built in 1861 and converted to a hotel in 1998.  My room was very cute and bed-and-breakfast-esque:

Our hosts in the Dublin office were very friendly and knowledgeable, and we got to enjoy O'Donoghue's Pub, complete with a live Irish band.  I also had my first Guinness, which was available on four of the twelve taps at the Schoolhouse hotel's bar (I won't divulge how many I had after that).  While I'm not much of a beer drinker, I do like to get the full experience of my surroundings!

The rest of my experience was pretty much as Irish as the hotel and the Guinness.  I learned that the songs we used to sing at the St. Patrick's Church St. Patrick's Day celebration, are, in fact, authentically Irish.  This discovery earned me the right to sing "Molly Malone" with several Irish gentlemen.  Seriously...I knew this song...and as you can hear from the audience, so does everyone else in Ireland:

Oh...and to explain the title of this post, one of the Irish "lads" I was with made some sort of leprechaun joke at dinner, and they all cracked up laughing, and another one yelled "When in doubt....LEPRECHAUNS!!!"  I almost choked on my Guinness.  I didn't realize that the little green men were actually something that came up in Ireland.  I was proved wrong.  Cheers!