The Sun And The Moon

I like London's China Town, not that I've been there for some years. But it used to have an atmosphere of Bohemian seediness and the smell of spice mixed with bodily deposits. My kind of place. Not that Puerto Pollensa is anything like that. Perish the thought (save doggy deposits, that is). But you can forget Agatha Christie as the promotional motif. Come to Puerto Pollensa, where the Mediterranean meets the Orient. Puerto Alcúdia and Playa de Muro may, combined, have roughly the equivalent of a World Cup squad of Chinese restaurants but they are diluted over a fair land mass. The Puerto Pollensa Chinese land grab is far more concentrated.

I had been inclined to think that it was some sort of wackiness, a Puerto Pollensa-goes-East Grinstead in L. Ron Hubbard terms, but no, Serenity Coast turns out to be, you guessed it, a Chinky. One of the international variety, whatever that is. Just a chopstick's throw from the other one, the wording above the restaurant is like that you might find on a CD of music to do massage by. Sun and moon, and wind, and promise, and some other stuff. When it opened, there was a bit of a Chinese do, which was fair enough, but I'm damned if I can make head or tail of a Chinese dragon in terms of what it's all meant to convey. Serenity Coast, not a bad name though, if, that is, you're talking an Ibiza chill-out album perhaps.


Still on all-inclusives
Much as I have wanted to avoid the gloom, it is, I'm afraid, unavoidable. Another bar owner had a word. Again, it was not recession but the all-inclusive. When owners say things are bad, you are not inclined to disagree with them. The rough economic climate has exacerbated the underlying market change that the all-inclusive has caused.

I have been known to defend all-inclusives, if only in the pursuit of balance and objectivity. There have been some outlandish examples of blame being placed at the doors of the AI. When it was once suggested that a restaurant away from the centre of the old town of Pollensa was suffering because of AIs, that was stretching the bounds of credulity.

The AI has been an easy target for blame, and the mindset now is to seek to lay ever more blame. There is little point in dissecting the economic and market situation, either that at a macro level of recession or that at a micro level, of which the AI forms a major part in Alcúdia or wherever. No-one is inclined to listen.

Yesterday, I referred to a "breaking point". That was in terms of businesses going down. There is another breaking point - people's attitudes and actions. When there is talk of protests and of mass closures of bars, shops, etc. as a demonstration of what things might look like if there is no intervention (with AIs), one has the growing sense of a breaking point, and it is only the middle of June. Perhaps the high season will mark an improvement, one can but hope so. If not ...

The sadness is that this was all too easy to have predicted. The economic shocks of the past twelve months may have been less easy to have forecast, but an economic downturn was inevitable, at some point. The fact is that there has been a decline over the past three to four years, a decline that the AI is only partly responsible for, and despite a so-called record year in 2007. Nevertheless, it did not require such severe shocks and resultant downturn to have exposed the folly of a local tourism economic model disrupted by such a fundamental market change as the all-inclusive.

When bar owners seek to air their grievances through the press, what alternatives do they have? Some might argue that, well, that's business, chum, and if things aren't working out, then better you go and do something else. That would be callous and heartless. Perhaps there was a fear that to deny the tour operators and hotels and therefore the tourist their places in an all-inclusive sun would have meant the abandonment of Mallorca and its resorts. Maybe so. But one hears and sees, and one wonders if it might not have been some tough love had the AI been strangled at birth, because the monster that is now stalking the resorts seems only to be growing in its strength and drawing the life out of all around it. Breaking point?


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - It Bites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xslQTkZ0cxI. Today's title - "the wind and the rain"; and this is from?

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