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. 

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, at this point we were about a week out from our grand opening on November 15th.  The three of us were understandably anxious and there was one major obstacle still looming – the liquor license.  This was the first hurdle that was running on “Belizean Time” and we were trying to take it in stride since we knew it was bound to happen at some point.  If you recall, Cathy – who heads up the liquor license commission – had told us that they would be having a special assembly to determine whether or not we would be granted the license.  Well, that meeting kept being put off and we were starting to get nervous – how would it work to have our grand opening without the ability to legally serve alcohol.  So since Cathy’s phone never seemed to work and she never, ever returned messages, we routinely had to go to her house to check on the status.  We still hadn’t gotten used to standing outside someone’s house and yelling for them tocome out but that was what had to be done.  The last we had heard Cathy informed us that the fire chief, a police officer, the health inspector and she would come by the business to inspect the place and then after the inspection a decision would be made.  In the meantime we had already started doing some advertising in hopes that the liquor license would, in fact, come through in time. 

The various forms of advertisting that we thought would work best were simple, but being new to the area we weren’t sure what form of advertising would be most effective.  We posted up and handed out about 400 flyers around town – we weren’t sure what would happen due to the fact that we are not on a main road and there are really no street signs around which meant a high likelihood that people simply wouldn’t be able to find us.  We stuck a simple map on the flyer in hopes that it would slightly help the situation.  We also contacted one of the local radio stations to put some radio spots out for the preceding week.  There are really only two local radio stations for Corozal so there’s a great chance that people would hear the ad – it’s kind of a wonderful occurance when you are driving through town listening to the radio station and it suddenly blares out in surround sound because the building you just past is playingthe same station and then this same thing happens about ten times on your ride.  That’s when you know you are truly in a small town.  The third and final form of advertisement that we used was the “friendship” email list.  I simply sent out a PDF of the flyer that was being posted around town so that the expats would know we would be open.  So we restlessly awaited Saturday to see if anyone would actually show up. 

So back to the liquor license inspection - it took about thee set dates before they actually showed up, but the four inspectors finally arrived at the bar the Thursday before our Saturday grand opening – talk about cutting it close.  We had hired a couple girls to waitress for us so we were in the process of training them when the four “inspectors” showed up.  I was in the house when they arrived but Will was in the bar to greet them.  Suddenly Will barged through the door of the house and in a panic asks where the application is.  I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and he was in a panic so it automatically increased my anxiety level and I started getting frantic.  “The inspectors are here and they want to see the application!  They said we should have it!”  Will exclaimed.  It was not clicking in my head – I was in charge of all the paperwork and I had no idea how I could have missed this requirement.  The tension level in the house was moving up at a rapid pace, I snapped back that I didn’t know what they were talking about.  My train of thought was that this had something to do with the new employees and that we needed something documenting them.  I’m madly running around the place looking through all my various stacks of paperwork and asking Will, “what exactly are they asking for?”  He shot back, “I don’t know!  They just said an application!”  Finally I got frustrated and went over there to ask them exactly what they were looking for – I wasn’t sure why there was such alarm, it was a simple inspection but now the situation felt like a red alert, five alarm panic situation and it just seemed so unnecessary.  Once I got over to the bar I asked one of the inspectors what exactly they were looking for and he simply responded, “th paper you received from town hall – we all have to sign it.”  That’s it??  Of course I knew what they were talking about so I told them to hold on for  minute and I went back to the house to grab the paper they needed which had been sitting on the counter the whole time.  I headed back out to them and handed them the paper, once they had that they started the inspection.  This part did make me a little nervous since we had no idea what they would be looking for and we were planning on a big opening day in two days.  I had absolutely no reason to worry, they basically just looked around for about 15 minutes and said everything was fine.  I just had to put up a couple signs regarding alcohol consumption, we needed a larger fire extinguisher and the employees had to sign up for the food handlers permit.  The four of them signed the paper and gave us instructions to take that back to town hall and pay the fee.  So we were set to sell alcohol – yes!  We had avoided major disaster so far. 

So everything was falling in to place for the Grand Opening.  We had hired a DJ and had put the word out that we would be open so now it was just a matter of waiting for the big day.

The first holiday we really celebrated in Belize since our arrival came on October 31^st for Halloween.  Now, normally this wouldn’t be that big of a deal because Halloween is typically a fun, yet unimportant night for kids to go out and get a sugar high.  This is not the case for me, I love Halloween – it is one of my very favorite holidays.  I always dress up and find something to do and for the last three years my Mom and I have thrown some killer Halloween parties.  I grew up in a house out in the woods in Oregon, it was about a 40 mile drive to Portland and essentially it was in the middle of nowhere.  They still own this house and we utilized it’s spookiness to host Halloween parties.  We went all out too, for a week before the big night we would spend every spare moment to decorate each room (three levels) according to a frightening theme.  It was a big deal for us.  Well, it would be my first Halloween away from my comfort zone and regular party goers.  I didn’t even pack a costume – we had only been in town for a few weeks so I did not expect to be invited to a party for this dark occasion.  To my complete surprise people did have Halloween parties in Corozal and we were promptly invited to one.  As I mentioned in an earlier entry there are a fair amount of expats living in Corozal and they have some networking procedures set up for events such as this.  Often times someone in town will throw a party for this group of people and typically everyone gets and invite.  This would be our first experience with this trend and I have to say my hopes were high because of the occasion.  So my mom and I went out on a mission to find anything in town that could be considered a costume.  It was a last minute effort but it was absolutely necessary because what is Halloween if you don’t dress up?  After scouring the town for a couple days – there aren’t many options here – we found a couple witches hats and temporary tattoos.  We were desperate so it would have to work.  Will was just going to wear some Duke University attire and go as a Duke basketball player. 

All dressed up for Halloween

We really were having a great day besides the fact that it was Halloween, Solo had arrived that day with our new grill and it was a perfect fit.  Nothing fancy but it would do the job.  We had also purchased a fryer from the same little shop in Chet so that was here as well.  Our kitchen was starting to actually resemble a real life kitchen.  Also, after waiting for way too long, the technician from Belize Telemedia Limited (BTL) arrived to hook up our internet – finally we were connected to home!  It was a great day; things were really starting to come together.  So we were ready to make a splash at the party and possibly meet some new friends. 

The new grill

The new fryer

Now when I think of a party I typically think music, there should always be music at a party.  It doesn’t have to be loud or crazy but something must be playing in the background to provide a bit of party type atmosphere.  I even brought along my own Halloween play list as a backup in case the hosts had forgotten this very important component of any good party.  So we packed up the CD, some drinks (BYOB) and ourselves in to the car (we had hitched a ride from a couple also headed to the party) and headed out.  I was excited but also a little nervous; I’m not the best in social situations where I don’t know anyone.  I get shy and nervous in those circumstances so I was hopeful that I could successfully overcome that and meet people.  Most people were dressed in a costume so that was a good start but there was no music at all.  My mom handed the hostess my CD – hopefully this isn’t rude but it’s way too late now.  She actually put it on but this must not have been appreciated as much as I would expect because the volume was placed so low that I had to strain to hear any audio at all.  Oh well, so it wasn’t a party with music – I could live with that.  The next observation I quickly made was that everyone is in about the mid-40 and older age range.  I knew that I wouldn’t come across too many expats in my age range but I thought there may be at least one.  There weren’t any at this party.  No problem – in general I can get along with people of any age.  I’m trying to keep a fun and positive attitude about this party. 

The house we were at was beautiful and right on 4 mile lagoon so the moon and stars were shining bright since there was hardly any surrounding light.  The three of us put out our best effort to mingle.  It was sort of easy because no one knew us and everyone wanted to know who we were and what we were doing here.  Each one of us probably told our story about 10 separate times throughout the night, but I’ll always take an easy ice breaker so no problem there.  The strangest thing to me was the number of people we had been meeting from Oregon.  It seemed as if there was a much higher concentration of Oregonians in Belize than any other state or country.  There were about 40 people there in total, everyone was very friendly.  After awhile people tended to go in their little groups of 4 -5 people and chat about whatever was currently relevant in their lives.  Towards the end of the night – still early because this party would not go much past 9pm – the three of us had gravitated to two particular people.  Both from England, these guys seemed to be a ton of fun.  They sat at the table and smoked cigars with my mom; we drank and talked about a range of topics from boxing to good places to get a drink.  Ken and Dave would become fast friends.  Dave was a little gruffer than Ken and talked tough but they both seemed like fun guys.  Dave was headed out to the casino – there are three casinos in the “free zone” right outside of Corozal – to play poker so we decided to head home at that point since the party was winding down by that time anyway. 

Overall it was an interesting night, we learned a few things; 1. A party doesn’t always have music 2. Parties with this group of people would never run too late 3. There were a ton of Oregonians here – seems like someone must have done a lot of Belize marketing my home state 4. I would need to be absolutely okay about hanging with a much older crowd 5. There are teeny tiny bugs that live in the sand and bite you at night – these bites itch very badly.  Compared to my last few Halloweens this was a bit disappointing but it only meant that for Halloween ’09 there would be a killer party thrown at Scotty’s Bar & Grill.  Now, I would have to go to bed nursing my very itchy feet.  I had about 20 bites per foot that itched and burnt like crazy.