March 14, 2010
It’s a rainy cool Sunday morning and we are officially on a different time than most of North America. No matter how hard their government tried, the Hondurans simply resisted observing Daylight Savings Time. In 2006 they set their clocks forward and adhered to it (kind of sort of) for about 3 month before just deciding it wasn’t working out – thereby making it apparently the shortest time in history that daylight savings time has ever been observed. If you were here, you’d understand why this makes me chuckle a bit. Oh, Honduras.
So – we are officially open for business! At least, the bar is open for business. Yesterday we opened at noon, closed dow
n around 8 and had 9 customers! Not so shabby, if you ask me. We made fresh fruit smoothies with rum (mango, pineapple, bananas, fresh squeezed orange juice, pineapple juice, oh my!), margaritas with freshly squeezed limes and for a snack, I whipped up some yummy pico de gallo! If you translate that literally in English, it means the beak of a rooster. Some of you culinary experts might know that this is actually just a fresh salsa consisting of tomatoes, onions, peppers, and some spices (in my case, cilantro, lime and garlic). Throw in a side of plantain chips, and we are serving bar snacks now!!
We’ll be up and running the bar again today, and re-open again on Thursday with an actual kitchen! I am SHOCKED we are this far after 3 weeks, although some people around here thought we’d be open the 2nd day after we got off the plane. I think we are moving at a smooth pace considering how hard it is to get things accomplished.
We have much more success with deliveries – and I think that slowly the locals will know that we are here and brings things to us. A man and his wife selling seafood stopped by the other day – and Jason and I purchased a pound of large shrimp and 3 lobster tails from him to test out. The total was 175 lps (about $9.25). A older gentlemen who was delivering palm trees to my neighbors swung by and sold us 300 oranges for 100 lps (about $5.30). (We better start squeezing a LOT of fresh orange juice.) Clean ice and water is delivered promptly by a sweet guy named Joseph. We saw Joseph down at the open market playing his guitar and singing early this week, and we invited him to stop by the bar in a few weeks when we have customers and he could sing for them.
The beer company FINALLY delivered us a new small cooler and took away the large one – only took them two weeks. We also almost have completed putting together one of the finest kitchens in La Ceiba, which includes a 2-basket deep fryer, a stove with a flat-top griddle and 6 burners, a stainless steel large fridge and a deep freezer, plus we have a 7′ stainless steel prep table. This really is top of the line and more than I expected us to have this early in the game. But hopefully we start cranking out a lot of delicious meals for a lot of hungry customers
So, things are going pretty well around here! We went out the other night with our neighbors to an area of town called Zona Vida. We’ve been moving so quickly here that we haven’t even really been given a full tour of the city, so it was nice to know that this area even existed. It’s on the other side of town, but it’s down by the beach and there are a lot of really nice restaurants and hotels (and dance clubs). We went to La Quinta Real, which is this incredibly nice hotel with a nice outside bar by the pool. Then we went to another smaller outside bar on the beach to have a couple drinks. We also had anafre, which is the Honduras version of bean and cheese fondue. It is served in a clay pot and warmed with charcoal – quite tasty!
