Back to the Scotty’s story…Our first big party after Grand Opening would be our Super Bowl party. In Belize American Football is not very popular but there was enough of a following between some locals and Americans we had met here that we decided a party was in order. Also it helped that my mom and I are major football fans so we wanted a great place to watch the game too and what better place than our own bar! The first problem was that we did not have a big TV in the bar – certainly not large enough to facilitate a party focused around watching it. So we decided to borrow Dave’s projector to hook up to the TV and project the game on the side of one of our walls. The battle was between the Cardinals and the Steelers and we made some marketing efforts to get people in for the big game. Flyers were printed and distributed, we sent out an advertisement to the expats via email and we hyped it up to anyone who came in the bar. We weren’t sure what to expect really but we were excited about it. We also tried to promote it by selling score squares for $5 a square which would pay out after every quarter.

The weekend before the party we had Dave bring in the projector to do a test run. The game was scheduled to start around 6pm our time which meant it should be dark enough at game time to avoid having to black out the screens and windows. We got everything set up and were totally relieved that it all worked – it also seemed to be just dark enough for everything to show up so we were all pumped for the next weekend. I really hadn’t followed either team but since Arizona is closer to the West coast I had to cheer for them and made a couple side bets just to make it a bit more interesting. So a bottle of wine was at stake for me.

Super Bowl Sunday finally arrived and we were in a scramble all day to get everything set up and ready to go for that night. We got the screen up and projector set up. As the evening grew closer we were slightly worried because it didn’t seem to be getting as dark as it had the weekend previous – it probably had something to do with the fact that it was a beautiful, bright day instead of slightly cloudy. So we started to get a little panicky when it was 5:30 and pre-game wasn’t visible. We went out and bought a ton of big black garbage bags and started frantically stapling them to the walls to black everything out. We got done – with a major group effort – just as most people started to arrive. It turned out perfect – we definitely had the biggest screen in town for the game. We had a special game day menu of nachos, pizza by the slice and hotdogs – we wanted it to be simple and quick. We had a packed house and everyone was happy – the game couldn’t have been better and of course came down to the wire. The squares were a hit and made it that much more fun for people who didn’t know anything about the teams playing or even much about the game itself. The vibe was fun and exciting and everyone was in to the game – cheering as if we were all right there in the stands. It was a total success, well, I did lose my bet for the Cardinals so I was short a bottle of wine but I was happy to give it up.

Most people left after the game but a few stuck around and it would mark the first time the bar actually ran out of beer. Overall it was a major hit and absolutely no one complained about anything – or we just didn’t know about any complaints.

The next big event would be Valentine’s Day but things in my life were set to explode in the few days following Super Bowl…

For new readers who may not have read how the timeline on this blog works I want to avoid any confusion.  I have two storylines going simultaneously here; the first is the story of my experience moving here to Corozal from the beginning and that story is delayed about 9 months at this point, the second is a chronicle of my experiences currently.  To determine which is which, the entries that recount my current experience include, “Real Time Entry” in the title.  Any other entry is back to the delayed story.  Hopefully that helps a little. 

After my Dad left my mom and I got to experience visitor withdrawal.  It’s a horrible condition that occurs when you have moved away from friends and family to a totally foreign place and have begun to settle in when suddenly someone from back home comes to visit and reminds you of the people you love and the place you are familiar with.  Then that person leaves and the feeling is homesickness and loneliness.  We did get to spend New Year’s Eve with my Dad which was really nice – we had a very small party at Scotty’s with some of the regular customers we have and also some friends we had made up until then.  It was a fun night and there was a blast of fireworks at midnight – we had the TV on to watch a countdown to the New Year.  Little did I know then how much my life would change in 2009. 

Everything at the bar was moving along smoothly.  Because it was a new year we had to renew all our licenses.  For the most part this was no big deal – just a bit of paperwork and money.  The trade license was easy, a simple renewal.  The liquor license was the most complicated of them all – we had a slight issue with Cathy (the liquor license queen) during the month of December that we felt may curtail our ability to get a renewal on the license.  It was a pretty funny story actually and one that opened our eyes to how things would start to work around here.  Most of the businesses around town host office Christmas parties and the government offices were no exception.  Well, apparently Cathy was in charge of obtaining a venue for the mayor’s party and one night just before closing time she walks in to our bar.  She comes right up to the bar and tells us that the mayor’s office will need to reserve our bar for that Wednesday evening for a group of about 30 town counsel people so they can celebrate at their annual Christmas party.  Oh, and they wouldn’t be paying anything or buying food or beverage from us, and naturally they would need the place closed to the public since there would be so many of them.  What?  At this point we are a brand new business and can’t afford to just give our space out for nothing, especially with less than a 24 hour notice.  So we start questioning her about the whole issue and she throws back subtlety threatening questions about our employees’ food handler’s permits – in effect trying to establish some sort of dominance over us by implying that she had the power to shut us down if we didn’t cooperate. 

Well, this did not sit well with any of us.  My mom tell her that we will discuss this and call her in the morning to see if something can be worked out that is fair for everyone.  We ultimately decide that we don’t want to play that game with her so the next morning when my mom calls her and tells her that we can’t just give up the space during business hours for free, Cathy starts in on an additional fee associated with our liquor license that they forgot to charge us.  Now we’re pretty upset at being so clearly pushed around.  So Will and Salvador decide to get this all straightened out by going to talk to the mayor himself.  Salvador happened to know him and where he lives so they made a trip over there before we talked with Cathy any further.  Will runs the entire situation by him and the mayor tells Will that Cathy had told him that she had our place confirmed for their party a week ago.  He told Will not to worry about any additional fees either – he said he would be giving Cathy a call to straighten this whole thing out.  Before Will even got back to the house Cathy had called us back and she had done a complete 180 in her attitude towards us – suddenly she was overly sweet on the phone and asking how much it would cost to rent out place for the party.  We quoted her $100 off our regular rate because we did want to be fair and in the end she declined, “Maybe next year” she retorted with a cynical laugh. 

We felt good about how this had all gone – we learned a very valuable lesson that day – it was good that we didn’t take her at face value and let her use us as a doormat.  The problem now became that she still headed up the committee which decides who gets their liquor license renewed for the new year and who doesn’t.  So we were a little nervous that she would be holding a grudge.  The first step of the renewal process was to go to the town hall and pay $10 for 5 photo copied “applications” to fill out.  If you would like them to complete the three entry spaces they gladly will for a fee of $50, but we chose to take the 10 minutes to complete them ourselves.  Then we had to go to a committee meeting in which all other business owners attend and it is announced by the committee one application at a time if that business is granted their license. 

So on a Monday my mom and I attended the meeting not really knowing what to expect.  It was a bit of a circus.  We were hoping that this meeting wouldn’t take up the entire day because we had poker later that night and Monday morning/afternoon was really our only down time during our regular operations.  We got up early to get ready for this meeting, and we decided to walk there since we thought that parking would be a bear considering anyone selling liquor in the town would be present at this meeting.  We show up about 15 minutes early and we shouldn’t have been surprised that we were the first to arrive, so we had our pick of a seat and sat down to wait.  A couple of officials showed up, including our friend Cathy, and slowly a few more people started to show up.  We were expecting quite a crowd but by 15 after 9 there were only about 10 people there.  We were the only North Americans there (we were expecting a few more based on who owns businesses around town) there were only about 5 Belizeans and then all the Chinese business owners started to show up.  The room consisted mostly of Chinese business owners by the time we got started. 

So Cathy started the meeting about 20 after 9 and we quickly figured out that it was essentially pointless to be present since about 3/4 of the business people weren’t even there.  They already had the approved licenses printed out and they started calling individual names out to pay for their renewal.  They started with a beer license, then wine and malt and then we got to the restaurant licenses.  This is where all the chaos started.  Most of the Chinese business people present were here for the restaurant license and Cathy started to call out their names.  No one responded after the first few names and then one of the men who spoke a little English came up to start talking with Cathy.  She asked him to translate for her, but it really didn’t get much better.  They all started looking at each other and talking over Cathy and the translator…finally a few minutes passed and Cathy told the translator to inform all the people here for a restaurant license to come forward, at this point half the people stood up and went to the front, they couldn’t figure out the names or what was required so after a few more minutes she had the translator tell all the Chinese restaurant and shop owners that they were all approved and they could come to pay later…at that point they all stood up and left the room at once, all laughing. 

Well, that left about 10 of us again and after a few names they finally called Nancy Rifenbark and we went up front.  She says that our license is approved and we can pay at the cashier.  We asked her if we had to pay right away and they tell us, no, we have until the end of the month to pay for the renewal.  So we left after about 50 minutes of chaos.  There was absolutely no need for us to be there, we could have simply gone to town hall on Tuesday, asked if we were approved and paid the fee.  Oh well, we are slowly learning and it didn’t turn out to take too much time, plus the experience was worth the wait. 

So the New Year was here and we had all our licenses under control again – now we would see how business would be this year.  Poker was moving along well and giving us some exposure to people who weren’t coming to our place before so that was encouraging. 

Now, back to last year -things at the bar had been moving along well.  It had been a few weeks since grand opening and we were steadily gaining new customers as well as seeing repeat customers coming in.  It was a good sign.  Our state of mind was pretty good too; while Oregon was having one of their worst winters in a long while we were swimming in the Caribbean and sweating when we laughed too hard.  We were still in the honeymoon phase of our move to Belize so we met every experience with eagerness.  We were also looking forward to family visiting soon.  My Dad was scheduled to visit in a few weeks and my uncle was planning a visit right before that.  So we kept ourselves busy with trying to finalize our menu and prices, entertain customers, picking out the perfect plastic Christmas tree and watching all the newly released movies on DVD for $5 BZD. 

We wanted to get a gimmick of some sort in to our place to spread the word.  A lot of people weren’t aware we were open despite our marketing attempts and sadly a lot of people who had heard about us were having a hard time actually finding the place.  We needed to figure this out.  One of the expats we had met during the Halloween party, Dave, from England had started to become a good friend.  He was a regular in the bar – at least 3 times a week for lunch or beer.  Dave is an interesting guy and a perfect example of the type of person I would never meet in Oregon.  He is the personification of a “tough guy.”  He is extremely rough around the edges with a heavy English accent; he’s rude and blunt and doesn’t particularly like Americans.  Apparently he was able to put up with us though and one day spoke to Will about a possible way to get more customers in.  He is an avid poker player and Will also had a love for poker so the idea was to have Scotty’s Bar & Grill host a private poker tournament every Monday.  We were closed on Mondays anyway so it would be perfect.  The plan would be that we would be closed to the public that entire day and the game was hosted by Dave and set up as invitation only.  He already knew of a group of players which is what he would provide and it wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s business because the casino’s poker room was closed on Mondays.  We would have a couple poker tables made and hire dealers from the casino to make the atmosphere a little more professional.  At the end of it we agreed on all the details and planned a date to start the game.  Will was going to be in charge of running the game with Dave. 

It was an interesting experience to get this whole thing set up.  No one in town was doing it so it would put us on the so called map of Corozal, at least among this group of influential people in town.  I won’t go in to details of who was on the player list but it contained the names of some of the most prominent people in town so I was excited to meet these people to say the least.  We had to get permission from one of these people to even have the game and he gave us the authorization to move ahead – he wanted a place to play too.  We hired Ducky to assemble the poker tables, he had done a great job on our bar stools so we just stuck with him.  Dave had a set of standard chips and we got professional decks of playing cards.  The game would be Texas Hold’em, it would be set up as a tournament that would pay out three places in the end and it would all start around 8pm. 

It was a trip when we had our first game.  The atmosphere was totally different on Monday nights now.  We had people in from all walks of life, Belizean and foreign, young and old, women and men.  The poker tables had turned out beautifully, they were blue felt with a padded ring and cup holders to top it all off.  Each table held about 10 people – it was as if we had suddenly turned in to a mini casino.  We are in Belize so the game did not start on time.  9pm was the actual starting time and these people were absolute poker addicts.  It was a friendly game, but friendly did not mean unprofessional.  All the standard rules applied and it was absolutely fascinating.  Behind the music playing in the background and the cigarette smoke wafting through the air, there was the clamor of poker chips being played with, cards being dealt, groans of disgust as the wrong cards appeared and solo celebration when the winner was realized. 

It was around 3am when it was all said and done and had gone well.  Will stayed out there with them for the entire night while Mom and I tried to go to bed a little earlier.  It was impossible to sleep through the noise though.  So that was our new gimmick – Monday night poker games – little did we know that everything would drastically change with Dave over the course of the next few months. 

The first American family holiday that we would be in Belize for was Thanksgiving.  None of us know exactly how we would react to not being home for this day.  We knew what everyone’s plans were back at home and after being in a strange country for a little over a month it sounded really nice to be back in Oregon with friends and family and the food we were used to.  Expats who had been in Belize for awhile gave us a general timeline for our emotional journey of adjusting to Belize – they said it was a broad rule.  The first couple months are all about being excited to be in a different country and experiencing new people and customs, after that the homesickness usually sets in and it can be bad for awhile.  During this homesickness period a lot of people decide to go back home because they start to feel it’s not worth it.  Then after a few months people tend to go in and out of being really homesick and embracing Belize which takes them in to a year and that is typically when people have gotten settled in and decide to stay for awhile.  At this point we were still under the two month period and excitement was definitely still in the air for us.  That being said we were starting to miss home and we didn’t even really know how to treat Thanksgiving as far as the restaurant went. 

Salvador and Vanessa (our employees) told us that some Belizeans actually celebrate Thanksgiving – which I thought was very bizarre.  Apparently not many of them take part in the holiday but there are some.  Along with that the various American expats (as well as some Canadians with American friends) all had their own Thanksgiving parties planned so we knew they wouldn’t be in either.  In fact we had been invited to one of these Thanksgiving parties but had decided to pass because it just felt so weird to spend Thanksgiving with a bunch of people we really didn’t know that well.  None of us really wanted to be open because we knew it would be a hard day of missing home so ultimately we decided to open and then based on business that afternoon we would decide to either stay open or close down early. 

So the Thursday of Thanksgiving came around and as expected it was very difficult.  As soon as I woke up there seemed to be an unspoken sadness in our house.  We all knew that we were missing family but we also really didn’t want to talk about it because we knew that it would just cause tears and we were all trying to be strong.  This holiday was especially hard for my mom; it had been harder than expected for her and my dad to be away from each other and along with that she has an extremely close relationship with both of my brothers who had both lived with them at home before she had moved to Belize.  Since I was here with Will I didn’t feel like I had the “right” to be extremely homesick – after all she was here without her husband.  So I tried really hard to be strong about it but that day it just wasn’t happening so I just gave her a hug and tried not to talk about it much.  We got a few phone calls from family that morning so we did get to talk to everyone and of course asked for a detailed description of what would be served for dinner – I can’t even tell you how good turkey and mashed potatoes sounded. 

I cried after I woke up for awhile – I got that out of my system and got dressed.  We got the bar opened up and as we had expected it was dead.  No one was coming in so we decided we needed a day to not have to entertain customers coming in – being in Corozal it’s nice that we can just decide to be closed and no one really minds too much.  So we wrote a note on the gate and closed up.  We decided to go to a local resort and use their pool for the afternoon.  We didn’t have a turkey, a ham, potatoes, stuffing or any of the regular Thanksgiving fare but my mom had made a pumpkin pie which we would enjoy later.  One of the local stores had been carrying pumpkin pie filling so she snatched up some of that and made a few.  We actually sold it at the restaurant for awhile too and it was a big hit.  That is one thing that Corozal does not have – good dessert – so my mom was starting to try and satisfy that need. 

We laid out by the pool for a couple hours, ate ceviche and drank beer.  It was not the typical Thanksgiving celebration by any means but we tried our best to have fun.  One some levels we didn’t even feel like it should be Thanksgiving – coming from Oregon it is not 80 degrees and sunny during Thanksgiving dinner.  There are lots of people around the world who spend this type of family holidays away from their families and now I know exactly how that feels.  It was different for me, I’ve always been lucky to be able to be around family for these celebrations and it is special to be able to do that.  I am the type of person who is very close to my family so based on how that experience went I wasn’t sure what to expect for the upcoming Christmas holiday – the good news was that my dad was planning a trip to visit us during the last couple weeks of December. 

Okay – back to the story…

There are a multitude of holidays in Belize and as an employer we have to be very aware of these holidays due to labour laws here. In Belize holiday pay is double and being a new business we had to decide if it was worth being open at all since some days we didn’t even cover wages at this point. It seems in Corozal specifically that there are certain holidays where people want to go out and eat at the various restaurants around town and then there are holidays where everything is a bbq or family picnic set up so we had to rely on our staff to steer us in the right direction.

The first holiday we encountered being here was Garifuna Settlement day which marks the 1832 arrival of the Garifuna people to Stann Creek and is celebrated on November 19^th. It’s mostly celebrated in Southern Belize but the holiday is countrywide. Word was that there was going to be a beach party in celebration on the bay side in Corozal so we decided to close down the restaurant for the day. We were looking forward to a rare day off so we had planned to take part in the festivities. At this point it hadn’t been raining too much anymore which was nice – things were finally starting to dry up. It had been a little cooler than usual lately though – it’s almost laughable because we were actually getting cold in 70 degree F weather. In the meantime back home in Oregon they were having an unusually cold winter – with actual snow. So we would complain to our friends and family back home that we were cold at night and had to put on long shirts and pants and they just laughed at us – I’m sure there was some eye rolling going on too. In any case it was colder than usual for the Belizeans and we would go around town seeing people in real winter coats. I think it was more the temperature swings than the actual temperature because during the day it would be in the 90’s and then at night drop down to mid 60’s range. So my point with all this weather talk was that the three of us went in to town after sleeping in that morning (it was a Wednesday), it was a noticeably chilly day and it was as if we had walked in to a ghost town. Nobody was out and I mean nobody. Everything was shut down and everyone was apparently shut up in their homes. We walked all along the seaside and there was no sign of any beach party to happen that day or night.

We were really confused about what was going on, but no one was around to ask so we basically just walked around town and went back home. A little disappointed that we weren’t going to experience the music and dancing that day. Salvador came around to the house to hang out with Will later that day and we asked him what was going on. I almost choked when he told us that everything was cancelled due to the bitter cold 70 degree F weather – what? It wasn’t even raining. I flashed back to all of the outdoor concerts I had attended in the pouring down rain or freezing cold that I had attended in Oregon. This was outrageous – people in Belize hate the “cold” weather.

That night we were getting bored. Will was being his hermit self and didn’t want to do anything but stay in and watch TV – he was in a major funk here and couldn’t seem to pull himself out of it. My mom and I couldn’t stay in the house – we hadn’t been getting days off and we wanted to take advantage of it. So we decided to eat at a local restaurant called Vamp’s Chill and Grill. So we headed out – we made our way in to the restaurant and it was pretty empty, there may have been two or three other people in there. The bartender was playing some punta rock on the stereo and it was a good vibe. He saw us come in from the bar and sit down. He came over and took our drink order – then when he went back over to the bar and suddenly the music changed. Mom and I sort of looked at each other quizzically and listened for a few minutes before stifling our laughter. He had changed the music to some sort of awful female pop CD that he obviously thought we would prefer. Now my mom and I are very much in to listening to the local music so we just sat there and couldn’t help but keep laughing and cringing at the new play list. We had our drinks and ate our food – they have delicious pan fried fish – and then we took our leave trying to listen whether or not they would change the tunes back after we left. Just as we were getting in the car, sure enough the music changed again. We both hoped that night’s music debacle was the last of its kind.

After grand opening things slowed way down. We knew that business would dramatically decrease from that night just based on what people around town had told us about openings here in Corozal. Everyone comes out of the woodwork to check it out and then you will never have that many people at the same time again. The let down was a tad disappointing though, the rest of the week was painfully slow. The good news was we were starting to get a good mix of expats and locals which is exactly what we were going for. We were also getting some great feedback about the food. Everyone loved the burgers – ours were by far the best in town. We had found the the perfect blend of meat for the perfect juicy burger, we seasoned the beef ourself, we utilized fresh produce for all the right toppings and we even had our own special sauce to complete the package. It was a real, American style cheeseburger and it tasted just like I would get at home. None of the other restaurants in Corozal knew how to utilize the ingredients they had to mimick our taste. We really thought it would be great because we weren’t directly trying to compete on food, rather we were indirect competition as another restaurant. We may have been a little naïve to think this because it doesn’t seem to work like that here. Rather every restaurant in town wants all the business – it sort of makes sense since really all the places here have the same menu so they were all very used to competing intensely. The menues are so similar that at this point I could recite the standard menu at request. We actually got quite a bit of negative feedback initially that we weren’t going to do well without the local staples on the menu bas as people got more used to the idea that we were different they stopped trying to convince us otherwise.

Now, here’s where the fun of owning a bar starts to happen. We were up and running and now would start to meet people. In my opinion this is both an upside and a downside to this industry because there are some people who I could have gone my whole life without meeting. Sadly, most of them are expats. Some of these bitter people would come in to our restaurant and wrongly assume that because we are American we completely agree with their ugly views of Belizeans. We heard it all and it was not pretty, the worst part was that here are our three Belizean employees who get to witness this ugliness. On more than one occasion we had to make it very clear that we did not agree with anything they were saying. To some of the expats, it was as if our employees, Vanessa, Salvador and Sherie, were invisible. For those expats who weren’t brazen enough to express their feelings in front of Vanessa, Sherie and Salvador they would wait and look out of the corner of their eye before they would spit out the most recent venom they had on their minds. Sometimes we’d just have to put them in their place and sometimes we would stand up and leave, but either way we made it clear that we didn’t share their opinions. This part of it made me really tired of being in a public place where anyone could walk in and spout off while we would have to civil because we didn’t want to scare everyone off. It also made me sad that this is how Americans were being represented in this small country.

Luckily there are another group of expats who are totally opposite of that. Otherwise I don’t know if I would have been able to make it here. This second group of expats stays to themselves though so they are a little harder to find. Everyone has to eat though so they came to us which was great. So here is when we started to make some friends and meet some very interesting people. The main characters in the story and people who would become regulars at our place will change throughout the months but to begin with the theme was English. I already mentioned meeting Ken and Dave at the Halloween party and they were in our first group of regulars. Both are single guys and over 50 and they couldn’t be more different. In fact, they rarely spent a lot of time together and they would come in to our place at different times during the day. The next couple who would become our English friends are a couple named Lucy and Anthony. They were a couple who had been together for awhile and they were both very outspoken and very animated. They were also friends with Ken and most of the time the three of them would be in the bar together. It was quite a scene – personally I had not travelled much before I moved to Belize and I have never travelled to England so living in Oregon did not give me much exposure to English people. It was great that here we were able to meet so many people from so many different places. The first thing that united our new English friends was their humor in making fun of Americans. Luckily I am a pretty easy going person and I can roll with the punches so I don’t take this stuff personally – especially when so much of it is a huge generalization. So most nights we would get in to arguments about the English language and the proununciation of the word aluminium. We talked about politics and religion – both of those forbidden subjects and we all had a great time laughing about it. It was great to get a different perspective on events happening around the world. I don’t limit my news exposure to the American media but I also didn’t have good friends from other parts of the world before I moved to Belize so that I can get a different, personal view of events and it was refreshing.

As far as our Belizean customers go, they were still checking us out. We greeted everyone who came in but they weren’t sure of us quite yet and frankly I don’t blame them based on the general expat attitude I was experiencing about Belizeans. I would be very suspicious as well. So these relationships would clearly take some time. We relied heavily on our fabulous waitress Vanessa to let us know what people thought about the food, the atmosphere and us. She is great because she is completely honest with us and will tell us whatever needs to be said regardless of feelings. She herself was sceptical about coming to work for a bunch of “gringos” and didn’t really expect it to last long but she decided we weren’t so bad after all and didn’t have the typical attitude so she stuck around. I love Vanessa – she’s a 25 year old extremely outgoing girl who has the best personality and smile I’ve encountered for a long time. We totally lucked out finding her and we’ll do everything to keep her onboard. She has original ideas, tattoos and doesn’t buy in to religion – I knew we would get along very well.

So as we continue along we would soon reach our very first family holiday here in Belize without our family, Thanksgiving would be a very interesting event and we were all a little nervous about how homesick we would realize we were.

Well, here it was – Grand Opening. None of us could actually believe that we had pulled the whole thing together so quickly. We had the opening planned for a Saturday and everything was set. The DJ would arrive around 4pm to set up, we had alcohol stocked, a supplied kitchen and staff in place. Everyone was a little nervous because none of us knew exactly what to expect. We were hoping for a good mix of local Belizeans and expats – our overall goal for the restaurant was for it to be welcoming to everyone. It was a real concern here in Corozal that we could easily discourage Belizeans from eating at Scotty’s if we didn’t play our cards right and that was the very last thing we wanted to do. We were going out on a limb with our plan to only serve burgers, fries and sandwiches. Almost all the other restaurants in town served local dishes such as rice and beans, but we wanted to stand out so we chose not to compete with that – we were not going to pretend that we knew how to cook these dishes. It had been discussed between the three of us that we would change our plan if it came to the point that we were getting enough negative feedback about that decision.

The opening hour was set for 5pm. We chose to skip lunch hour on this day since we felt we would have a very large crowd for dinner and we didn’t want to overwhelm ourselves. The burger had been tweaked to perfection by Will, the fries were turning out fantastic – we went with handcut curly fries to be different – and we had finalized our beer battered onion ring recipe. We were slightly concerned about our fried food. The fryer we had purchased did not regulate it’s own temperature which meant that if we started to get large orders for fried foods the oil temperature would go down dramatically as we continue to fry food and things could get messy but this is what we had to work with so we couldn’t worry about it too much. We had another unique item on the bar menu, lime cello – Will had home brewed the concoction himself as a variation of lemon cello. It is made with Belize’s over proof rum (similar to 151) and lime peels and then added to simple syrup after sitting for a couple weeks and served ice cold. No one in Corozal had this refreshing little drink on their menu and we had high hopes for it. There were also some minor improvements we had to make to the road around the bar – the rain had flooded a lot of the road and surrounding areas which meant that cars continued to get stuck in certain areas around our place. This would not be good for customer satisfaction so we had gravel brought in and dumped all along our gate to ensure cars could park easily without getting caked in mud.

All the employees were at the bar around 11am and we were all running around making sure the final touches were in place. By 4pm the DJ hadn’t arrived yet but we weren’t too concerned. We had a spot for him already set up and we had called to confirm he was coming, he was, and was just running on Belizean time. We had a few expats contact us before Saturday and make reservations for 5pm so we were expecting people right at opening time and, sure enough, they arrived right on time. So it started – we were all so excited to serve our first official customers. I say “official” because we had about 4 days of a soft open before grand opening just to make sure we had the menu down – we had been given great feedback from that. While that first group was ordering the DJ finally arrived and got set up. Now, our place isn’t very big but it’s also not totally enclosed so we were anxious about how it would go with the DJ. We basically told him to keep the music at background level until later which he was okay with. So he continued to set up and then it hit…we got completely slammed. We all moved into high gear and got a little panicked. It quickly became a mad house – we had rented some additional chairs and tables for the chance that this would happen and now we were very happy we did. People just kept coming in and had to share tables or wait for tables. The first wave of people were all expats and they absolutely, 100% hated the DJ. They constantly told us to make him turn the music down – which we did until it was barely worth having the music there at all. Will, Salvador and Salvador’s brother Eli were in the kitchen running around like crazy getting orders out and Vanessa, Sherie, me and mom were in the front getting drinks out and orders placed. Sweat was running down my face and I was trying hard to just slow down and think a little. Other than the music everyone seemed to enjoy the food and the experience – as expected we started to have problems with the fried food after a bit because the oil wasn’t staying hot enough so we did start to get some complaints on that but everyone maintained a positive and helpful attitude.

As the first wave of people were leaving a second group started coming in – this time it was all locals. It was a little later now so we had the DJ put the volume up a little and this time people were enjoying it rather than complaining so it wasn’t a total waste of money to have him there. At this point no one was buying the lime cello so we started taking a few shots to calm the nerves a little – not sure if this is the best idea but we went with it anyway – we were trying to have fun with this night since it was turning out to be such a big success. Everyone on the staff was meshing well and having a good time. The fried stuff continued to be a pain so at the end of the night we just had to stop serving fries and onion rings – this would be a problem that would have to be addressed.

Towards the end of the night – closing time was 11pm – there was a group of expats hanging out and having a great time drinking and dancing and there were a few locals still hanging around doing the same. It turned out to be a great atmosphere and at that point we all could start relaxing. The only negative to the night was Will’s stress level – he was completely stressed out even at the end of the night and mad at me for taking shots during the night. So he stormed in the house and stayed there for awhile. I was elated that the night had gone so well and continued to be in the bar and socialize with everyone else. I could see Will’s concern if we would have gotten drunk while trying to operate the bar but that was hardly the case so I chose to not concern myself with it – we would have to discuss that one later.

About 12am we had the DJ shut down and closed the bar for the night. There were about 6 people there the whole time and they had a blast – they told us that they would be back and were excited for a new place to socialize. Once everyone had left we all sort of fell in to the closest chair and reflected a bit – all the employees left shortly after that and I crashed in my bed. It had been a success and that was extremely exciting. I knew we weren’t going to be that busy on a regular basis but the word was out and Scotty’s was open.