I also can't see expats going for poetry. I can see them going for sports, especially sports from home. (Notice all the posts on TT about "where can I watch Home Country Sporting Event in Name of City?") And newspapers from home. And beer from home, not Guinness, unless your primary clientele are already Guinness drinkers.
And, somehow, I don't see the kind of people who want a quiet place with books and no TV also being the kind who break out into singalongs at 5AM. I fact, I'm not sure I see them out drinking at 5AM.
I've written about this before.
In one of my incarnations, I was part owner of a bar/restaurant. Not for expats, but here in the US. If we hadn't gotten lucky and grossed so much at the beginning, we'd have been out of business in a month. We had no idea what we were doing and made a lot of stupid mistakes.
One mistake as that the majority owner wanted to created the bar of his dreams, but we quickly discovered that we had to make changes if we were going to survive. For example, he wanted to sere the kind of food he'd like to eat in such a place. But it was too expensive. People have an expectation of the price of bar food. We couldn't serve what Mr. Majority wanted at a price our customers would pay. So our choices were to either scale back on the food or sell it at a loss.
He liked to drink fancy liqueurs and ordered a ton of them. Customers weren't interested, so we had all this useless inventory.
We also had no idea how much work it would be.
