Well, I said I was going to be a bartender. 

I looked so much forward to it. This is how it goes. In my mind I had all these wonderful ideas about being the bartender here. I saw the place, the view is absolutely amazing and for this I have to show you just one of those pictures. So this is the picture I paint: wonderful evening full of happy, drunk people enjoying their holidays, tipping me. My life is bull of purpose, I get up, looking forward to be the one that smashes the drinks (i know smash is probably a weird word here to use) like a handsome, happy bartender does. Pina Colada, sure, let me go do it. Tack tack, here you go, my lovely friend, enjoy it like it is the taste of a sunset itself! Kaboom. Another customer happy, me happy, I get a drink, awesome music to listen to, it's all fantastic. And  I call my mom and tell her how happy I am, how I found my joy, I would find my soulmate, we would make many babies. I own a castle with 7 horses too. 

But the problem with these dreams is one thing: we never think of how we get there. I did stand behind the bar and did make drinks, but as soon as someone would ask me to make a pina colada, I would realize that I had no clue of how to make one. Moijtos I did know, but when measuring I was always afraid that when I didn't fill the cup perfectly, they might complain and everybody would know that I am not a professional bartender. ANd then I tried to improve the way the bar worked because we were constantly behind with either not having lemons, no one would wash the dishes, because over here we are all the boss and only ladies wash the dishes, or we would run out of ice, not remembering orders correctly, or the electricity would go off. ANd because I am from a western country where we do try to be polite I started to wash the dishes because, well, someone has to and we would stop running out of glasses all the time so we'd be more efficient. Well, the others didn't care so I ended up washing dishes while my passion for making the drinks didn't get to full fruition. I then tried to talk about this but it seemed very uninteresting for the others. Maybe the issue was that they got paid, so why care about improving the place. Which made me run into my next vulnerable point: be assertive and be the leader, say what I want. I am quite easy to be overrun, am do have a true talent in being not so good in selling myself and standing in for my ideas. I then started to calculate all the drinks and what their ingrdients are (in grams). and then I invented a system to caculate the cost for drinks so we 'd know a) how much of what ingredient we would need and how much gains we made per drink (i.e. the passion drink would not make any sense, because it needed so much exotic ingredients, barely nyone orders it and the cost / gains per drink weren't that far from each other, so I'd advise to drop it). I had my fun, I learned a lot. But unfortunately the owner had only little time and was more busy trying to get her employees to love her by treating them like her own kids while aso being very occupied following her own ideas, no matter what. So she would hang up white cloth all over the reastaurant to make it look bright only to invite a shaman three days later to make a fire in the restaurant which would turn everything gray and black and make the place look, well, not so bright no more. Reason was not her strength and neither was business, so she loved my ideas but that was about it. My words ended like many others somewhere in a corner that would soon be forgotten. I eventually stopped measuring stuff and quit. So what do we learn? Well, I learned personally a lot about peoples words don't always mean much but also, that we might have to endure troubles in order to get somewhere. This time, I clearly did not hassle for too long with the troubles and left my dream. I put it in the corner where all my words were too. But I now know that running a bar is not that simple. 

My friend calculated all her expenses, which took him many days. He discovered that people stole money and that many people are profiting off of her. She was thankful for all the work we did for her. But even after advising her in many ways and helping in many forms, she kept attracting the same tyupe of people that had the same type of behavior, which she then treated tough and held her speeches for an hour about how to work properly, only to walk in her restaurant the next day, with a massive hangover, dresses like a hippie, dragging in her wet dog. She often was holding a speech and then showing the perfect example of what she expected her workers not to do the next day, which obviously didn't have a great impact. I love her, she is a wonderful being and I am so grateful for all she did for us. I wouldn't have known what to do without her. I only write about her here, because I came to realize, that it is hard to change people when they hold beliefs in their subconscious that keep them making the same mistakes. I always wonder where to draw the line of "I help you with your stuff" to "I let it go as you have to experience this in order to grow and I can not make you learn that lesson if you are not ready" kind of a deal. It was hard to see her struggle and yet mess up and not taking our advise seriously. It also had a bitter taste of being treated disrespectful. But that really is just my issue, as no one can make us feel a certain way, they can but show us, what we think of ourselves. And would I have respected myself, I would have been more assertive or just left. But we are all learning. And eventually we did leave too. And so here I was, experiencing that ones advise doesn't really come to fruition if people are not ready. And while it was frustrating for me to learn, I also came to realize that maybe many people felt the same way with me when they told me my first girlfriend wasn't good for me and I kept going anyways. I had to proof myself something and I had to learn the hard way. And so I do understand how hard it is to accept advise, that we don't want to hear. I think, whether we listen or not, we eventually will learn. After we left, she had money stolen again. And even though she did alright, she sold the restaurant some years later. I am sure she learnt from it. I definitely did learn from it. But let me talk about the awesome work we did there. Tomorrow I will tell you how the three of us could survive with 50 USD in a month. It includes diarrhea and a wonderful time in the jungle.

See you soon...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twb65Ov67ZA