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.
Because it is simply not true
I guess it is supposed to be a joke, or meme. But it is pretty unfunny. It is just stupid.
Sounds perfect. A nation free of oppressive morning people.
Lies!
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
Spain is quite far in the west of a too big timzone. In the summertime the solar noon in Madrid should be around 2:15 pm.
They aligned their timezone to Germany to make Hitler happy. Seriously.
also, i guess, because it simplifies trade?
On the other side, those evenings with still a bit of sun at 10pm were awesome
I love Spanish timezone. During summer it gets bright right when you wake up and you get 5-6h of daylight after work. There’s time to go for a bike ride or for a hike or spend couple hours in the sun at the beach. In the middle of the week!
In comparison in Poland the day is longer but it gets bright at 4-5AM and it gets dark about one hour earlier.
There’s two reasons for those hours.
- 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…
- 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.
I actually upvoted before reading the last sentence.
Then I read the last sentenceThe way you present the country is pretty racist to say the least.
Dafuq?
Iberianophobia?!
It presents the ever famous image of “lazy Spaniards don’t work and have lazy hours.nothing is open ever”. That’s racist.
Lmao. You need to learn what racist means.
In the Equality Act, race can mean your colour, or your nationality (including your citizenship).
I’m pretty sure I know. Do you?
In any case, we are arguing about semantics. You would agree that the post was prejudicial, right?
It started off with “Spain is not a real place”. Learn to take a joke. And he didn’t say shit about people of Spain, he made a joke about their hours. Calm down before your head explodes.
It’s definitelly Prejudice, and since it’s based on nationality rather than on race, it’s not by definition Racism (which is the latter kind).
I think we agree on viewpoints, we differ more on the definition of racism. I agree that racism classically has been about ethnicity, but in modern days it’s more broad. For example:
In the Equality Act, race can mean your colour, or your nationality (including your citizenship).
So if nationality can be qualified as a race, discrimination about nationality should be called racism.
In any case, you can replace racist in my original comment with prejudicial (although racist sounds way more heavy, which is why I prefer it) and it’s true anyway.
Yeah, I’ve seen some Legal Acts were discrimination on nationality was defined as Racism.
I am very wary of using Racism for discrimination based on nationality because, having been victim of discrimination based on my Nationality whilst being an immigrant abroad and having the same “Race” as the people in that country (basically I look the same as they do) and also having seen the discrimination in that same country against acquaintances of mine with the same Nationality as me but not the same Race, the treatment I got was not the same as they got, prejudices against me were was far less frequent and those against them were far worse (though, this one time, negative culturally prejudiced expectations about me did snowball into something huge and highly damaging to me).
But it is based on race, just an older definition of race. There was a time when southern Europeans were classified as the “olive race”. In the bollocks scientific racist hierarchies of the time, that put them below the Aryans, but above the Semites and the blacks. The Nordicist racists of course considered themselves the apex, and looked down on the rest. In the US you guys still remember how the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, the Jews, were very slowly integrated into the category of White, meaning they were not always considered White.
The caricatures of the lazy southerners are indeed racist stereotypes of this past era and to claim that they do not persist in the modern era is kind of weird, seeing how so many other racist stereotypes persist.
Yeah, ok, there are Prejudices around Southern Europeans in general and those are on something other than a specific nationality, though whether or not it adds up to Racial Prejudice rather than Cultural Prejudice is unclear.
I can tell you you that as a Southern European I was an actual victim of Prejudice at times when living in Britain, but only when people actually knew were I came from, since they couldn’t actually tell I was from Southern Europe merelly by how I looked or even from the way I spoke (because I had lived in a Northern European country for almost a decade before Britain and had an unusual accent).
Personally, I never felt it was because the way I looked (I easilly passed for English) and instead it was entirelly down to were I grew up in and, interestingly, if I mentioned the years I had spent living in a different country in Northern Europe, those prejudiced expections would normally go away.
That said, I knew of people from my country in Britain who are mixed race and the kind of prejudice they got was very different (and way worse), so maybe there is at least some racial component (i.e. the way they see White Portuguese is different from the way the see Black or Mixed-race Portuguese) in it, but maybe not in the direction the previous poster thinks - it seems to me that Whites only get Cultural Prejudiced whilst those who are Mixed-race and Black get Racist Prejudice.
Absolutely.
I would just however push back on the implicit hierarchy in the way you write it, where cultural prejudice is a smaller degree of prejudice compared to racist prejudice. For example, a black American tourist in, say, N. Ireland, will probably face less prejudice than a white Romanian immigrant. It’s all intersections.
Yeah, that’s a good point.
If racisms would be based on race then there would be no racism as we are all one race, the human race.
Two points:
- Sadly, in the minds of most people there are several physical characteristics which they see as making people different, so de facto there are various races because most people mentaly divide mankind into such partitions. Good that you don’t, but you yourself don’t get to deny that a certain way of viewing others that most of people hold exists, just because you don’t like or share it.
- Raceism (or in Spanish Racismo) - literally has no meaning if it’s root word, Race (or Raza), has no meaning.
Your “argument” is both egotistic and illogical.
My point is that people equate nationality to a race. So when they are talking negative about a nationality they are indeed racist by the standart of common speech.
If we get scientific and say people are only racist when they talk negative about a race, then the thing falls apart because there is just the human race.
I’m arguing that not just physical appearance is a race in the minds of people, as you say, but nationality too.
My experience - as a Southern European - having lived in various countries in Europe is that people did not see me as having a different race.
They saw me as a having a different Culture, but not actually race, and whilst on more than one occasion when living abroad people expressed prejudiced opinions about me when they didn’t knew me well as a person but knew where I came from (which they couldn’t tell from the way I looked or even my accent, since I looked like them and my accent was the product of living in multiple countries), when I mentioned that I had lived for almost a decade elsewhere, in Northern Europe, suddenly those prejudices would vanish, all of which leads me to believe it was about the dominant Culture in my life rather than any racial markers.
Further, those people I knew abroad who grew up in the same Culture as me (so, Portuguese) but had a race other than White got an entirelly different treamtment (significantly worse) than I did and which was pretty similar to other people of the same race and not to other Southern Europeans.
Hence why I think that there is Cultural Prejudice which is different from Racial Prejudice and what I read in these posts here sounds a lot more like the former than the latter, though I grant you that it’s unclear where one ends and the other starts.
Also hot weather means you eat later. You can see that comparing say Germany and Italy.
I usually eat at 2, which accounting for timezone is 1pm in Portugal (best country to compare to, next to us and without the timezone nonsense). Is that late for you?
I usually would eat at 12:00 and then dinner at 18:00. That often changes, but that would be the norm.
What does race have to do with anything said? Is Spanish (or Spaniard idk what’s correct) a race?
It’s not only not a race, the whole thing is not even negative. It’s a clear example of “everything I personally don’t like is racism”.
Light-skinned people are not a race either and they still treat people with darker skin as if they belonged to a different race.
I was on Tenerife recently. I arrived early in the morning (still night) and searched for a place to have breakfast. Most would open at 7 but I found one that opened at 6. The other customers were people on their way to work and pensioneers or people who just liked to get up early.
Delicious bocadillos and coffee and freshly pressed orange juice.
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.
What’s interesting is that Spain’s colony Mexico has similar meal times, but the big meal is at about 3pm, and the evening meal is just a snack that many people will skip.
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…
Fun fact. It’s because of Nazis.
National Socialists or just fascists in general?
Nazis for Spain is bit of a joke. Franco wanted to suck up to Hitler who put Belgium, Netherlands, and France on German time when he conquered them.
Close enough, then. Not just fascism, Nazis. Even if the Nazis weren’t directly in power, it sounds like they are in the causal chain for the timezone being so much different from solar time. Thanks for the clarification / confirmation.
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.
I agree with your timings, but Spain has an obesity rate of over 20%, so I would say seldom is a serious underestimation.
Also, Spain is not a mystical domain filled with elves, of course people are lazy, over-eat, and snack in excess. They are human after all.
Also, Spain is not a mystical domain filled with elves
Eh, Disneyland, walkable European city – same difference!
The Spain we saw was about 25 years ago. We saw the old Spain that was just transitioning to the Euro. Our first visits, we were actually dealing with Pesetas which made it easy at the time because a Peseta was equivalent very close to the Canadian penny. 100 Pesetas was $1 CAD.
Malaga still had a lot of old world charm as it hadn’t really changed in 30 years and looked like something from the past. The last time we saw it was about 8 years ago and now it looks like an American Disneyland … almost like the Spanish pavilion for a world fair or something.
And that old culture is what I remember. People were still living with little and the generation at the time remembered what it was like to be poor and their parents only ever knew life as being poor or living with little. Plus the country is hot like the desert in the summer … so all of it was conducive to everyone eating little because they didn’t have that much wealth and the weather made it uncomfortable to want to eat too much.
I’m sure it’s changed over the years but not by much.
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.
Which funnily means the Spaniards tend to have dinner at the same time as the Portuguese, who use GMT and tend to dine at 8 PM.
Does school and work also start later?
School definitely does, and work does as well AFAIK. I doubt many people would be having dinner at 23:00 if most of them needed to be at work or school at 8:00.
… you should eat two hours before sleep. You need 8 hours of sleep. You need time to get to and ready in the morning to get to work. This is not enough time (though I do realize that Spanish dinners are smaller)
”breakfast” spots OPEN at 1 pm
I have finally found my people. I must go there.
Yeah, that is not true.
Spain in also in the wrong time zone. Because of Nazis.
The last point does not hold. Spanish people I know eat dinner at 11 PM and breakfast at 7 AM. And they live outside of Spain, the timezone issue does not apply here. Idk when they sleep (Siesta? Siesta in Sweden/Germany?) Please explain.
I’m Spanish, from Spain. We eat dinner at 8-9, maybe 10 if it’s out, 11 is way too late to have dinner, people go to sleep before 12. I did the same outside of Spain too because of habits.
Lunch is at 2pm too.
Siesta (aka nap, idk why people idolise the word when there’s a direct translation) is right after lunch since eating gives sleepiness appparently, but that’s not really a thing anymore, we need to work until 5-6pm and there’s shit to be done after that.
Idk about the Spanish people outside of Spain you know, but I’m from Spain, living in Spain. Oh, and most people start working at 8 although I try to find places where it’s 9-6 because I stay way too late, but that’s a me thing.
Thanks! It should be “Some Spanish people I know…” Sorry if I overexaggerated. It’s just that over my life in student dorms, multiple unrelated Spanish people would be in the common kitchen when I was going to sleep (maybe still chatting after dinner), and they would be there when I woke up. This was blowing my mind.
I think when you use the word “siesta” in English (and many other languages), it becomes more specific than “nap”. Like, if I take a nap at 8PM to go out and party later, I would not call it a nap. Similarly, when I was a kid I was napping while parents drove me to school - that I wouldn’t call siesta either.
Siesta would definitely make sense in Germany. It’s not as hot as Spain, but it makes up for it by being very unprepared for summer in terms of architecture and the presence of air conditioners, it’s quite humid and most cities are far away from the sea. Finding an employer who lets you do it is another matter though …
Siestas are the one thing I miss back in the time I worked in a country that observed them. Nothing better than having a cup of coffee after lunch, taking a quick nap after, and waking up just in time for the caffeine to kick in. If I do that at my work now, I’sd probably be fired for sleeping on the job.
Plot twist: they’re a bus driver.
Yep, siesta. 1-2h after lunch. A lot of places close for 2-3h in the afternoon. Some people work 7:00-15:00 without lunch break. Over all a lot of people can take a nap around 16:00 and power up before going out at 21:00. Those who can’t don’t stay up that late. Sunset is around 22:00 so in many places at 19:00-20:00 it’s still hot outside.
Restaurants usually open at 20 or 20:30, not 21.
Have you tried adjusting your clock to local time?
