A few days in to the New Year, I would like to wish everyone a very happy and healthy 2010! Check out http://www.expatdailynews.com/2010/01/racy-calendar-girl-pictures-cause.html for a brief summary of my New Year’s Eve experience here.

I would also like to make a note that any new entries of my experiences here will not include “real time entry.” Now, since most of my entries are of my current experiences, I will only distinguish the past experiences of setting up my restaurant with, “Scotty’s Story” at the heading of each of those entries.

Thanks for reading!

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.