Night Boat To Cairo

If it's the 20th May, must be update day. Follow-ups to the Chinese bazar and tourism density stories.

On the first one, it's been bugging me since I wrote that piece. Then I realised what it was I'd failed to mention the other day - the existence of other "bazar"-type shops; other shops not run by Chinese, but run by Spaniards, Mallorcans even.

In Alcúdia, there are three shops of this nature - De Tot Un Poc by the market square, one up near the tourist office and a third by the old hospital. Maybe there are more. In Puerto Alcúdia, there used to be one quite big cheapo place in what was taken over by a combination of the Petits i Mamas shop and Genius toy store, the latter now Engel & Völkers. It was pretty good; my household still has some decent towels to testify to that. Puerto Pollensa has at least one, as does Pollensa town, both of these, like one of the shops in Alcúdia, made a thing of selling stuff for one euro.

The point is that the cheap and cheerful Chinese bazar is not significantly different to any of these Spanish-run shops. Except in one respect - Chinese. I'm not sure if one can draw any conclusions, but let's just say that the low-cost shop phenomenon was not unknown before the arrival of the Chinese bazar and is also not unknown as a line of business for the local Mallorcans. I leave it to you to draw a conclusion.


And so to the tourism density issue. Having declared Can Picafort the tourist-sardine centre and having asked for any suggestions of somewhere that could rival Can Pic's claim to this award, I duly got one. Seamus volunteers Peguera. Something about more hotels than you'd find Frauleins in Lederhosen in Munich. Which does raise a whole different issue, but let's not dwell on that. But I take the point. In fact Peguera is a sort of German colony. There is, I understand, even a German school there. There again, Can Pic was essentially a German colony as well; before the Brits started to occupy to some extent. Mallorca can seem like another of the Bundesländer, and Peguera is like a Hauptstadt, one of hotel-squeezed sunbedsraum.


And weather. No surprise to learn that May thus far has exceeded records in terms of rain. Yesterday was yet another utterly miserable contribution to what has been a diabolical month overall. To give a measure of how much rain there has been, in Palma there has been 138 litres per square metre till now; the norm is 31. In all this I guess people will be searching for evidence of this that and the other, but I suggest it is no more than a righting of nature as the winter had been generally very dry. However, that is a rather facile explanation, so I myself went searching for explanations and was amazed at the sheer deluge of websites and blogs and so on devoted to weather. I had thought that perhaps the explanation would lie in the influence of La Niña, but I'm none the wiser despite having trawled through all this meteorological worthiness. Let's just say it's been very wet.


QUIZ
Chain - So how do you get from Led Zeppelin to the British Electric Foundation? Today's title - couldn't think of anything "bazar", so thought Arabic and here's the youtube of the nutty boys - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSTHMxBttlU

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