What?!? Gunfire??
About ten days after our arrival to Belize the three of us were finally starting to get comfortable in our surroundings. Despite hearing horror story after horror story from the expats here we were feeling safe and sound that night. Will and I were watching the Portland Trailblazer game on TV – a small, but appreciated taste from home – mom was reading in her bedroom. All of a sudden there are loud blasts close to the house. Keep in mind we had been hearing all sorts of bad things about our neighborhood, in fact we had just found out that the previous owner had been attacked in the house and shot by the intruder – funny the little details people omit when trying to sell something. She survived the attack, but the bullet grazed her head and caused vision trouble in one eye. We were trying really hard to keep this new information off our mind and had been doing a great job of it until those blasts started to sound. I just froze, my mom and Will have the same reaction. No one said a word, I’m not sure any of us took a breath for about a minute while this was happening. All that was going through my mind was that the noises sounded a lot like gunfire. Will finally turns to me and asks if that sounds like gunfire to me. I just nodded my head slowly. At that point my mom comes out of the bedroom with hesitation, eyes wide and asking us what we thought the noise was. A few minutes later Will looked out the window reluctantly to see if anything was visible - nothing. The noise started up again so I went over to the window, heart pounding. We had only been here for a little over a week and already we were going to be killed by random gunfire – outstanding. I’m straining to see anything out the window and suddenly to the left of the house I see colorful bursts in the air – fireworks! A wave of relief came over me and I yelled out “fireworks!” We all immediately fell back laughing at ourselves. We were all able to sleep easy that night and a little amused at our reaction to the whole thing. Apparently in Belize fireworks are the standard practice for any holiday celebration. We didn’t expect them that night because we weren’t aware of any holidays during that time, but there are a lot more holidays in Belize than at home so obviously something was being celebrated.
The next day we were all happy to be alive and our task was to deal with the required liquor license for our business. We had been procrastinating a little on this important detail because everything else had been going so efficiently. We took the walk in to town and went to town hall to start the process. We learned that we had to track down one woman who headed up the committee that issues these licenses. We were given a phone number and vague directions to her residence. The phone number was useless; we called about thirty times with no answer so we went on a quest to find her house. After about an hour of searching and asking other people for directions we found a house that seemed to match the description. In Corozal no one goes to the front door to knock – the typical method of operation is to pull up to the house and honk or yell at the house until someone comes out. This is a little difficult to get used to, but we must follow procedure. So we stood outside of her gate and yelled for awhile until finally someone came out of the house. I asked him if Cathy was there and he said yes, disappeared back in to the house; finally a woman emerged. I told Cathy we were opening up a bar in town and needed to get a liquor license. She informed me that the committee had already had their final meeting for the year and that they wouldn’t meet again until January. This meant that we would not be able to get our license for two months. Well, we wanted to open in two weeks and without a liquor license it would be hard to call the place a bar. I asked her, very politely, if there was anything we could do. This would turn in to our first introduction of “buying” our desired result. She simply said that we could pay $100 BZ for the committee to have a special meeting in order to grant the license early. We didn’t have much choice so we said no problem. We paid the money and Cathy said that she would be around to the business in the next week with the chief of police, fire chief and health inspector to check the place out. At this point we were keeping our fingers crossed that this process wouldn’t take too long because we wanted to be open in two weeks.
Everything else was in place for our Grand Opening on November 15th, but we wanted to have a soft open a week before that date. We would have to sit back and wait on the liquor license but everything else was coming in to place. We had found a local bakery, Popular Bakery in Orange Walk town, to make our hamburger buns. They were even going to make us slightly larger buns for our “Big Bay” burger. We had several leads on stores to get most of our supplies (alcohol, condiments, meat, cheese, etc) in Belize City so we had a trip to Belize City planned for the next week. Belize City was formally the capital of Belize but after most of the infrastructure was wiped out in a hurricane the capital city was moved to Belmopan. Despite that Belize City (referred to as Belize by the locals) is a larger city with a much larger variety of our restaurant/bar requirements. Solomon was going to be our taxi again for that trip and we were eager to make that trip.
Getting settled in | admin | June 7, 2009
belize, Belize City, change, Corozal, Fireworks, gunfire, night, Portland Trailblazers
4 Responses to “What?!? Gunfire??”
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Korvell Pyfrom, June 7, 2009 @ 7:13 pm
“We had only been here for a little over a week and already we were going to be killed by random gunfire – outstanding.” I love that sentence. I like how you are recapturing these moments and recalling them so vividly. I must admit I would have been terrified after learning what happened to the previous owner. You guys are brave! Hang in there!
By I Make Thousands of Dollars a Month Posting Links on Google from Home, June 8, 2009 @ 7:15 pm
Hey, nice post, really well written. You should post more about this.
By I Make Thousands of Dollars a Month Posting Links on Google from Home, June 9, 2009 @ 1:14 pm
Nice post, thanks.
By mylittlebecky, June 9, 2009 @ 8:19 pm
don’t your know that when you hear gunfire you’re supposed to “hit the deck?”
how scary, good thing it had a happy ending!