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.

3 Responses to “Grand Opening Aftermath”

• 

  By Colette, July 16, 2009 @ 11:57 pm

  Good on you girl for saying it like it is. We have the same bitter and twisted, racist, negative expat group here too, but like you in Corozal, we also have a fabulous bunch of intelligent, creative and fun people here who appreciate and respect the fact that we have been extremely lucky to have been welcomed into this beautiful country. We need to represent so that Belizeans don’t think we’re all a bunch of idiots. Thoroughly enjoying your blog. Keep up the good work. Colette
• 

  By Carbunkle Trumpet, July 17, 2009 @ 2:55 pm

  what she said (but not in an English accent)
• 

  By Belizedragonfly, July 18, 2009 @ 2:35 pm

  It’s really very sad - and from feedback I’ve gotten on this post this sort of thing happens all over the place.

Other Links to this Post

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment