Nine months passed. I am waiting for the plane patiently. It's silent and peaceful at the airport compared to the mess and craziness of the cruise ship. At the same time, I don't miss the ship life. I feel much more relaxed and ready to go back home and spend time with my family. I feel drained and physically exhausted; the last time I left home, my wife was pregnant, and now our son is already five months old; I have not seen him since he was born. 

The plane arrived, and I was boarding the gate on the way home. Looking through the small window and asking myself, things could be way different; I should be there when my son was born. Now I am on the way home. The noisy man sat down next to me on the plane. He is a loud and overly engaging approach. He looked at me directly, saying nonsense, but I smiled politely and placed myself in the airplane seat. My seat neighbor keeps talking to me, but I am empty, can't say the word anymore. I am just looking through the small plane window. 

Nine months had passed, and it's been a while since I saw my family. The sound of the plane engine preparing to take off made me have goosebumps. I am nearly there, at home, where my heart belongs. After three connecting flights, finally-the plane landed in my hometown. Now the passport check is over; I am in the baggage claim area. It's hard to compare this to anything else in life. The happiness and butterflies in my stomach. The sliding door from the arrival gate opened.

I saw my wife and my son for the very first time. I run towards them, and I am unsure if this is happening or if I am dreaming. There are hundreds of people nearby being welcomed by their friends and family, but I feel there is nobody else at the airport, only my wife, son, and me. The moment lasted forever; it was a special and rewarding feeling after many months at sea by myself: hugs, kisses, and some tears, of course. And my decision seems to be final. I made up the plan, saved enough money, and am not returning anymore. I will open a small restaurant; it will look esthetically nice, with good service standards, just the way how I used to do on the ship, the same style. I saved some money; it should help me open a small restaurant business. I can make it on land, next to my family; I am determined to quit the ship life.

I decided to start my own business on land. I saved some money and decided to open up a restaurant. You know that ship life disease. If you ever work in hospitality, you know there is no standard like the one on the cruise ship. I am talking about service excellence consistency. When you work on the ship, you are brainwashed to perform on the outstanding service levels for 6-9 months. And when you come home on vacation, it isn't very pleasant when you go to any restaurant and see some cold, unfriendly faces in front of you. I also wanted to open a restaurant and transfer all my accumulated extensive hospitality experience into my own business operation.

The project was planned in detail, with a chosen specific location of the place, the design of the restaurant interior, food and drinks selection, and the target market for desired customers.

The first few months of the business were tough. You put on paper every little detail before the actual opening day. You plan the variety of food and the menu, and everything seems perfect before you actually start rolling your business operation. For the first four months, it was really slow. I did not have any customers. The problem was that I put my hard-earned money into the business, and it was challenging to manage the budget without any income at all. The place was set, the ambiance and the location were also good, and the amazingly inviting selection of cocktails, but no customers at all. The days and months passed, and I ran the business every month in actual minus around $1500. I did set the budget for a few first months until the restaurant started to make an income, but in the developing country where I lived, the government prevented small businesses from thriving. Instead of giving me some kind of support, they came to charge around ten different kinds of taxes, for the music, for the promotional signs in front of the restaurant, for the kind of music that I was playing (association of Musicians rights-I know it sounds ridiculous). The different inspectors came in the first few weeks of operation to make sure that they would charge me for almost everything possible. The only tax I was not charged in my restaurant was the tax on the air I breathed. Quickly, I realized that the reality of owning a business means a real mess. But somehow, slowly but surely, the customers started coming. I tried to replicate the same cruise ship hospitality standards from the cruise ship. I paid double the usual wage for the waiters because I wanted the best restaurant employees; I wanted the guest to be happy. It started to work really well. After months of hard work and accurate, detailed planning, the restaurant started to pick up and generate some serious daily income. Meanwhile, I took some leave of absence from the cruise ship company that I worked for.

My restaurant started to work really well. It was a real miracle. Six months after the opening, there was an outstanding monthly revenue for the first time. My restaurant started having regular customers who were pleased with the ambiance, food, drinks, service, and atmosphere.

All the years of experience working on the cruise ship finally paid off. I thought that my hospitality expertise was successfully transferred to life on the land, so I could stay home with my family while running a prosperous, sustainable business. I was very happy because there were a lot of restaurants that did not make it far since the opening day, the great restaurant that went closed due to different reasons.

I was lucky with my business plan, it worked really well, and month by month, business was getting better and better. It seemed that it would be my permanent business concept to run that restaurant in a successful and sustainable good way. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and out of nowhere, Covid 19 was spreading around the world and also came to my hometown... My idea of a fairytale ending and running my own business successfully was about to be seriously tested.

The pandemic and the total business collapse

It's always like that in life. Whenever you are about to achieve something, there is a certain level of the test you will be put through. It took me months of hard work to set up my restaurant operation and bring it to a certain level. I was so happy that I proved to myself something meaningful, that  I could do something else besides the ship career. 

And just when everything started to fit into a puzzle, Covid 19 happened.

In the first few weeks, it was just a precaution. The government was just advising the citizens, and as a new business owner, I did not know what to expect. Like any other person in the world, I was just hoping that this virus threat would quickly pass and that everything would be ok. About five weeks after the first recorded case in my country, the government introduced the first set of measures against Covid 19. In that set of measures, The working hours for restaurants and bars were limited, and hospitality venues were ordered to be closed at 21h. 

That was already a major hit for my business operation because 80 percent of my business's daily income came at that dinner time, from 20h until 23h. We still kept running the business somehow for the next four weeks. The revenue shrank with astonishing speed. All the hard work and effort, many months, it was for nothing. Day by day, the government was implementing more procedures and stricter protocols concerning Covid 19. Just at the moment when my business started to bloom, this incredibly difficult scenario happened. But I have learned something through my life, maybe we cannot control the things and events around us, but certainly, we can control the way how we react to them! Still, it's hard to deal with something like that that comes out of nowhere. The planet completely stopped in weeks, and I saw my world crushing under my feet. All the years I was saving money to start my business on the land, all the years of separation from my family, and this happened. Coronavirus caught everyone by surprise, and it was a heartbreaking moment for billions of people worldwide.

Day by day, week by week, the government was introducing stricter measures. My restaurant was still technically open, but the people in were scared to eat outside and to get exposed to the danger of catching the virus themselves. 

One night, I sat down in my empty restaurant. It was Saturday. Before the Covid 19, at that time around the same time, my restaurant was full of guests on the weekends. I had two cooks, four kinds of waiters, still employed in my restaurant because I felt bad about letting them stay without jobs. For the next three weeks, we still worked under strict government protocols; we sanitized the restaurant completely every hour. The daily income hit rock bottom. I sat in one of the restaurant chairs and did not understand why this was happening. From all other times of my life, why did I choose this horribly bad moment to start my own business? Why am I so unlucky with this decision that will cost me all the hard-earned savings from the ship? But the truth is, nobody knew about what was coming.

Before I opened the restaurant, I paid the 12 months' rent in advance. The owner of the place did not want to help me in any way; he did not want to refund any amount of the money that I gave him. The restaurant suddenly stopped working. There was a police hour introduced; citizens were only allowed to leave their houses from 12-14h daily to go shopping and to buy medications. For my restaurant business, that was the end of the journey. The owner of the place did not want to refund me around $3000, which I still had paid upfront for the monthly rent. He told me we have a contract, and I can't help you with that.

The country was in chaos, and so was my life. We did not have any more income; my family was getting social aid monthly and also the red cross package once a month with some food. It turned down to be the most painful time of my life. There were days when my family did not have food on the table. My wife and I were saving the food for the kids, and we didn’t knew what to do. We did not even have time to process what happened and all those hits we were facing then. I lost around $50.000 in investment, plus $3000 for the paid rent that I did not even use because of the pandemic. Everything that I had saved on the cruise ship for years was gone in a matter of a few months. 

But at that difficult time, I learned something more important. An empty pocket and broken heart can teach us some of the best lessons in our life. I was on my knees, depressed and heavily broken in every possible way that man can be broken in this life. The idea to open the restaurant was a long-term project that my family and I planned to settle down on the land, and we did it well, indeed. If the Covid19 pandemic did not happen, the restaurant would achieve pure success. Everything worked well with the business setup; we had the best customer service in the city, the best product, and a great restaurant location; everything seemed perfectly measured and predicted and well under control, but then the pandemic happened.

There are things in life we cannot control. We have to accept it, move on and take the lessons. But sometimes, it's hard to move forward, especially when you lose everything due to external factors. However, the next months were only getting harder and more challenging for me and my family. I had no choice but to stop being self pitty and get the strength to move and try harder. It's hard to watch years of hard work come to nothing, but slowly I was getting up and picking up some new strength. 

Tomorrow is always a new day. The darkest hour of the night comes just before dawn...