Tag: Sara Wilson

When I was 7 years old, I went to summer camp. It was only for a week and it should have been fun, but ended up being one of the most traumatic experiences of my life because I missed my family dearly. My homesickness was so intense that I cried constantly—walking to the lunchroom between activities, before going to bed—and I look back now and wonder how in the world no one took pity on me.

During that week-that-felt-like-a-year, the only bright spot of each day was after lunch when we’d stand around in a circle for mail delivery. My parents wrote me religiously

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.

There are times in life when everything just seems to be going right. Right now is one of those times. Not only do David and I feel like we couldn’t have found a more perfect business, but as we get to know Pepe (the business owner) and his girlfriend, Amparo, better, we’re realizing that we couldn’t have found better people to buy a business from. With Spain in crisis mode, many businesses are for sale and many sellers are desperate, which means there is opportunity but also uncertainty as you don’t quite know who you can trust and who’s telling the truth. Pepe’s also desperate to sell his business, but it’s not because he’s broke. Instead, it’s because he’s exhausted.

In New York City, life moves at lightning speed. Business is conducted every second of the day, subways empty and fill in endless waves of motion, and people barely stop long enough to eat. In New York City, time may still be measured in seconds, minutes, hours but these units of measurement take on new definitions when applied to the NYC lifestyle –so much so that "New York Minute" has become a term to indicate the fast, hectic pace of life in the Big Apple.

As a private chef, my husband David became more than familiar with the term as he often found himself racing against the clock—to get 80 perfectly plated dishes in front of 80 elite guests

My dad looks just like Santa Claus. Besides his stubborn tendency to wear shorts and t-shirts, even in the dead of winter, the resemblance is striking, actually. He has the same scraggly beard (except when my mom trims it), the same big belly (although abstaining from sweets has greatly reduced its size), the same jolly smile and the same twinkle in his eyes. And in true Santa fashion, he’s also extremely generous.

Year after year, he and my mom would work their magic and make our dreams come true. They’d pack us in the car and we’d head to my grandmother’s house in the mountains. And we’d hang our stockings from the chimney and examine the tree knowing that, by morning, it would be transformed.

In the days that followed, we learned more about Paco and only became more confused about our mysterious landlord. The agent who found us the place told us how she had discovered that he had put up a "For Rent" sign even after we had secured the apartment with a deposit. Apparently, he thought he could rent it out more than once. We assumed that he must know very little about how things work, having never rented his place before.

He told us that he wanted to stay on good terms with us and reassured us he would be fine reimbursing the fees we would incur in moving again (the post office charges of about $40 to forward mail

On November 15th, David and I will be moving and we’ll be taking our two cats and our 22 boxes with us. Torrevieja, with its close proximity to David’s family and its cheap rent has been a good transition place for us. But it isn’t our home, and we’ve known for a while that we don’t want to stay. We just didn’t know where we wanted to go. But now we do, and I’m excited for what lies ahead.

But the decision didn’t come easy. In fact, it was only after days of talking and examining our lives, including our past, present and future that we were finally able to come to a decision. The two contending locations? Altea, Spain or Paris, France.