Tag: bar

Most of us know instinctively that a relationship, like marriage, should be characterized by such values as honesty, trust, loyalty and selflessness. These are expected and come with the marital territory. Yet many within the context of marriage have experienced broken vows, disloyalty and disappointment. Of course, there are a slew of reasons as to why these instances occur and these are individual enough to fill an entire book on the topic. Chief among these reasons, however, is the issue of a lack of sexual integrity. The following fictitious scenarios are written to assist us in wrapping our minds around this concept of sexual integrity and how it should empower our relationships.

When David and I first opened AlteArte’s doors for business, we didn’t care who came through the door—we just hoped for customers. As long as there were people, we’d be happy, we assumed. However, two months in—after several visits from the police and even an incident of theft—we’ve already learned an important lesson: not every customer is a good one to have.

The first Thursday that the students came out in droves, we felt fortunate that AlteArte was their destination of choice and we welcomed their business and even offered a discount on the shots to encourage them to stay.

My mom recently came across an assignment that I had done in the 2nd grade. The sheet was tucked away within the pages of a scrapbook lain forgotten in my parents’ home for many, many years. Following instructions from my teacher, I had drawn a picture of myself and had made two predictions of what I would be when I grew up and what I would be doing in 2010, specifically. At the age of 7, I guessed that in the year 2010, at the age of 31, I would either be a cheerleader or a waitress. Incredibly, I was right-on with one of those predictions.

I don’t drink much. Actually, leave it up to me and I won’t drink at all. Ask my friends from college and they’ll confirm that while they would drink beer after beer at the frat parties Freshman year, I would slyly nurse one drink the entire evening. It’s not that I’m morally opposed to alcohol, it’s just that my body rejects it as if it were a poison. And try as I might (and my friends certainly did) raising my tolerance level is simply a no-go.

Therefore, some might see it as ironic that I’m now here in Spain running a bar, but I see things quite differently. I see AlteArte as being much more than just a bar. From the time when the original owner founded it and created the name and concept, it has been more than a bar.

Word spreads quickly in Spain’s small villages. We saw it happening in Torrevieja when the old ladies would sit out on the sidewalks until late in the night, gossiping among themselves of all the neighborhood happenings. Now that we own a business in Altea, a village of 23,000, we’re directly feeling the impact that word of mouth can have.

People are talking about AlteArte. Customers know my name although I have never formally met them; others have heard that there were new owners who made lots of changes and came to see AlteArte for themselves. It wasn’t until a man named Ernest came up to the bar a week after we had opened that it really struck home exactly how much people were talking.

I’m the type of person who prefers learning how to walk before being required to run. It just makes sense to me to take the time to test out the water before jumping in headfirst. So this whole business of opening AlteArte before I felt fully comfortable was downright nerve wracking. Nevertheless, despite my small panic attack we opened the doors and, at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 27th, we were officially open for business.

We didn’t have to wait long either before our very first customers came through the door! It was an older couple who sat down at the bar. I looked at David expecting him to take the order, but he didn’t move

In Spain, you can spend a lifetime waiting for things to happen. It took more than half a year of waiting, for example, to get my residency—considered a really quick turnaround. Therefore, I was naturally worried about how long it would take to get the lease and papers done for our new business, AlteArte. Not having the papers was fine in the beginning since we had to close to rebuild the staircase and add our own special touches to the business, but when the business was ready to go and the papers weren’t, it became a problem. So, when the month of February drew to a close and we were still waiting for the lease to go back and forth between the landlord’s lawyer and ours (who just happens to be the brother of our old landlord in Torrevieja), we decided that we simply couldn’t afford to wait any longer. In Spain, sometimes you just have to stop waiting and start doing.