Microblog Memes

Sounds perfect. A nation free of oppressive morning people.

I find this rather hard to believe. Particularly in the south of Spain by 1:00 p.m it's unbearably hot, everyone wants to get everything done in the morning so they don't have to be trying to do it during the height of the days heat.

We spent some time in Italy in the summer about fifteen years ago, and you genuinely had to be careful which cities you visited at which times because entire cities would go on vacation at the same time. We went to Bologna at the wrong time apparently because almost everything was closed except for a few things around the train station. While it was kind of nice having the place to ourselves and wandering the parks, it also sucked to have to eat convenience store food. Coming from a place where almost everything is open year round, 24 hours a day, it was wild.

One Summer we went to Spain before the DST issue got solved and because after arriving in Madrid it was 43° C we told ourselves "we'll get up earlier and have a stroll around the city at 6am so it's fresh" - it was DARK for hours 😂

Me and friends were joking about it was the country for those vampire movies where the night never ends

On the other side, those evenings with still a bit of sun at 10pm were awesome

Lies!

Spaniard here.

School starts at 9. Work can vary, but 8-9 is common. Typical breakfast is coffee and a pastry, but some people will have something savory instead. Not the most common, though.

Lunch is at 2pm. Restaurants usually take customers from 1 to 3.30 pm. If you have lunch at home, a proper meal is in order, but lately, less and less people can do this. So snacking for lunch during work days is becoming more common, sadly.

Dinner is at 9pm but there is a tendency to move this earlier, particularly when eating at home on work days. Restaurants take customers from 8 to 10pm, and a dinner out can last until past midnight.

We spent about 7 or 8 years wintering in southern Spain. Malaga, Torremolinos, Nerja, Almunecar and everywhere in between.

It took us about three years to figure out the local eating schedule.

Breakfast is about 8-9am and anything with a lot of food is usually a tourist meal. The Spanish live on air, coffee and cigarettes.... if they're feeling hungry in the morning, they'll have a pastry.

Restaurants will seldom stay open beyond noon and won't open until six. If you're hungry at 3 or 4 pm? It's better to starve.

Any restaurant that opens at 6 is a tourist place that sells a lot of basic fast food stuff.

The good local restaurants start opening at 8 pm and local families start arriving to eat at about 9 pm. The entire family, three or four generations of them will take up entire tables and sit around eating drinking and talking until about 10-11 and a few until about midnight.

They eat solidly about one good meal a day and snack the rest of the time with plenty of coffee, pastries or cookies but never to excess.

It's why you will seldom find an overweight Spanish person of any age. They eat little and constantly move all day.

I miss that place and wish we were there right now.

Fun fact, Spain's unusual schedule is partially due to timezones! The country itself is literally an hour late, and is kinda stuck in either an idyllic summer lifestyle or a vicious labor cycle, depending on how you look at it.

Glance at a map and you’ll realise that Spain – sitting, as it does, along the same longitude as the UK, Portugal and Morocco – should be in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). But Spain goes by Central European Time (CET), putting it in sync with the Serbian capital Belgrade, more than 2,500km east of Madrid.

Being 60 minutes behind the correct time zone means the sun rises later and sets later, bestowing Spain with gloriously long summer evenings and 10pm sunsets.

But for many Spaniards, living in the wrong time zone has resulted in sleep deprivation and decreased productivity. The typical Spanish work day begins at 9am; after a two-hour lunch break between 2 and 4pm, employees return to work, ending their day around 8pm. The later working hours force Spaniards to save their social lives for the late hours. Prime-time television doesn’t start until 10:30pm.

Spaniards have traditionally coped with their late nights by taking a mid-morning coffee break and a two-hour lunch break, giving them the opportunity to enjoy one of the country’s most famous traditions: the siesta.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170504-the-strange-reason-spaniards-eat-late

Basically, they still take breaks (that have pre-timezone cultural roots) in large part because they start too early and because they work and eat and sleep late... but they work and eat and sleep late because they start too early and take long breaks and the sun sets late... so they get less sleep and need more breaks and naps to get through the long day....

There's two reasons for those hours.

1. Timezones, as mentioned by several people here, you can mentally remove 1 hour for it to make more sense, Portugal is right next to us and their times make a little bit more sense. That doesn't justify all the numbers shown though, and that because...
2. They are fucking made up. Maybe if you didn't go to touristic hubs you would find more normal timetables. Work starts at 8 so breakfast joints open at 7 if early, people eat at 2, they have dinner from 8 to 9, 10 if it's eating out. At 11 people are preparing to go to bed in most of the country.

We do have family lunches and dinners occasionally, but that's not an everyday thing, not even a weekly thing. Maybe a yearly thing. Sorry for not having huge houses and doing them at restaurants I guess?

Restaurants stop serving around 4 and start again after 7-8 because they need to clean between the lunch and dinner service. Wild concept I know. Also it's not feasible to keep the kitchen staff there when nobody goes to eat.

The way you present the country is pretty racist to say the least.

TBF, they're using central european time (which is centered on the border between Germany and Poland), even though they're at the western end of their own timezone (with several parts being over the border to the next one) if our timezones adhered strictly to longitude. If you subtract 1.5 hours from all Spanish times, they're considerably less weird.

”breakfast” spots OPEN at 1 pm

I have finally found my people. I must go there.