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letter from IBIZA
Island where the party never stops. (Until 6 a.m.)
At last, weary residents get brief respite from crush of clubsters,
the Tribune's Christine Spolar writes
By Christine Spolar Tribune correspondent
August 10, 2008
IBIZA, Spain —
This legendary island of party insanity has come to a kind of middle-age revelation:
It no longer can keep up 24-hour clubbing.
That doesn't mean clubs like the white-leather expanse that is Pacha thump any less frenetically at 5 a.m. Or chill parties that begin near the beach at 6 p.m.—a kind of low-key clubbing for the sundown crowd—feature less D-cup decolletage from their tanned patrons. But a new law that closes clubs at 6 a.m. lends a certain quiet to the dawn—or as one taxi driver who hauls carloads of bleary-eyed clubsters around town every night said: "At least people who really live here can sleep."
Sunny Ibiza seems to have recognized the wrinkles that go with non-stop partying. This year, all five councils on the island voted to cut back hours to ease tensions between residents and the thousands of summer visitors who descend on this Balearic Island of Spain with inhibitions unhinged. Clubs must be shuttered until 6 p.m.
The councils aimed to clamp down on unlicensed clubs and their more rambunctious activities. (Think drugs, sex and all possible combinations of temptation.) They also wanted to relieve a few other headaches in a partyland that has rumbled on since the 1970s.
Flights of fancy
Tales of excess are ubiquitous and, in recent years, seem to have spun off of the surge of cheap air flights from other parts of Europe. Planeloads of young people would land, party for days and never check into hotels. Islanders apparently thought paradise was nearly lost.
DJs lamented the change—one worried aloud in a magazine article that Ibiza would become (gasp) like St. Tropez, France. City officials said they believe tourism had dipped this year but only because of the global economic crunch, not the decision to cut back the party. "We believe most people who live in Ibiza wanted this," said one city tourism official who shied away from giving her name. "Maybe people who fly in for a party want this to go on for 24 hours, but we can't live this way."
Ibiza, renowned as a onetime hippie enclave, still reigns as the Mediterranean's shimmery isle of music. The city's harborside walks are an open-air market for club music—with stands set up to provide headsets for the serious buyer or the just curious to listen to the freshest cuts.
Fellow Europeans are particularly keen to what plays here. Those who spend hours trolling the music scene in London or Amsterdam invariably end up on at least one summer bender in Ibiza.
Streets are agog by 11 p.m. Teenage girls flaunting more thighs than clothes parade by. Transvestites in flame-colored spandex preen. Bantering is encouraged. Double-takes are expected. Friendly, knowing laughs bubble up into the night.
Real destination: Clubs
But the clubs are everyone's real destiny. Fifty-somethings can be spied at the early chill scene; late night remains the domain of the young. Still, those of any age who think they are young enough to hang and dance in a club like Pacha—the island's most famous nightspot—probably are.
Sasha Smeets and Marjolyn Barneveld landed in Pacha one Saturday at 1 a.m. The two Dutch women—one 37 years old and the other 40—had to shout to be heard, but they were somewhat surprised at the dance scene that they watched from atop tiered white balconies: The writhing dance floor was calmer than they expected. The hip, it turns out, pour in closer to 3.
"It looks like very ordinary people," Smeets said. "I'd come back."
The most intimidating thing about clubbing may have been the entrance price: 50 euros a person at Pacha that night; drinks were selling at 20 euros a pop. (For dollar-bound travelers, that would be about $85 to walk through the door and $30 for a Coke.)
"That's a lot more than we'd pay at home," Smeets said. "Maybe we are a little old for this, but we just had to see what this was."
The possibility of thrills are Ibiza's draw. Three 20-year-old men from Sweden miscalculated just how far to go to make their mark on the scene. They headed to Pacha after midnight with one of them garbed in a long, red gown—apparently to attract attention or give off the gloss of cool. The stunt worked until the three youths tried to sidle up to some girls to pursue more lusty summer desires—part of a rather obvious checklist when in Ibiza.
"The girls looked nice," said Fredrik Linde, a truck mechanic. "But they weren't really interested."
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(chicagotribune.com)
the town hall of san antonio closes the bar can talaias in can coix
