When my mother and I were still on our way to Belize in Houston, we talked to someone who referred to Belize City as the armpit of Belize and commented on his preference for staying in a small town or village some distance away from the city. Not wishing to judge a city without seeing it myself, I figured I would pay attention to how the city itself was in order to fairly judge it. On our drive from the airport into the city it was clear that Belize City had a fair amount to offer from an economic point of view, with new construction and a lovely location astride the Belize River and the shore. The city showed itself as having somewhat narrow roads but lovely architecture and a pretty clear design.

A bit of walking to dinner on our first day convinced us that there was definitely a limit to how much walking one wanted to do in the heat of summer sunshine. That first day we finished dinner at rush hour and there was a huge amount of vehicle traffic moving along the main roads of downtown. People were out in the street walking, riding various vehicles, and seeking to make their way home, it seemed. The guide we talked to lived in a village two hours away from the city himself, coming to the city to work but not to stay. What is the end result of such a pattern of working in a city to make a living but seeking to live out in the country?

The result is something that meets at least one of the patterns that I have found in my travels, and that is the pattern of the working city where people do their business but don’t have a vibrant night life, and that result was seen when my mother and I went off to our dinner reservation on Friday evening. I stepped outside of the hotel to wait for our taxi to the restaurant and saw some truly empty streets. This was not at some late hour, but at around 7:00PM, a rather early hour for a city to be so dead. I had pondered by it is that most restaurants in the area seem to close at 5:00PM or 5:30PM and the reason was staring me in the face–there is simply almost no one on the streets at that hour, and so if a restaurant depends on local business rather than tourists, they are simply not going to remain open after the people leave to wherever they live. Only places that appeal to a tourist audience or to the few people who remain on the streets at night, or perhaps to the howling bands of local dogs that one hears occasionally at night, is going to remain open.

None of this makes Belize City a bad city. There are simply different ways that cities behave. When I was visiting Tampa before going to Belize, there was a story on the local news about Live Nation seeking to build a large concert venue for dance music in what appears to be a quiet neighborhood in Ybor City where the local neighbors are less than enthusiastic about thousands of people going to a concert venue. In an area where there were fewer people living and looking for a good night’s sleep and an early rest and more existing entertainment options, such problems would likely be far fewer. Some communities are organized for late night entertainment, dining and concerts and the like. Others are organized for the work day and then a quiet and peaceful night. Neither area is necessarily good or bad, it simply depends on knowing what kind of place one is in and how to deal with it. The streets that are filled with traffic rushing home after having made a living end up being quite lonely and even desolate when the crowds of workers have gone home. There remains something in those lonely streets after the crowds have left, though.