allegedly they are the hardest working european country (this statistic is purely in terms of hours per day worked, not actual productivity...a qualification which i find ridiculous but absolutely essential to understanding the spanish people). find that hard to believe? me too, and i've been wondering why i've been feeling so lackadaisical and lazy. not that i'm complaining about my jobless liberty abroad, it's just that i am starting to feel a little useless. and i've realized why...as americans it is ingrained into our way of being that we have to GO GO GO in order to reward ourselves with any sort of down time. the spanish way of life is the complete opposite...they dont GO GO GO anywhere, in fact the key to the spaniards i think is that they "savor" every minute. they say they'll meet you in a half an hour and you're lucky if they show up at all. they take their sweet time doing everything, from eating and drinking, to sleeping and partying (you can't even go out to a decent club until 2:30am and that's early by granadinian standards). as glorious a way of living as this sounds, it's actually incredibly irritating to be a productive person in an unproductive society, as i am constantly finding myself with big chunks of downtime.
for example, i want to get all of my errands done for the day as soon as i finish school so i can reward myself with a relaxing evening. once again the spaniards thwart me, as they close everything until five, so i literally HAVE to take two hours to myself to relax and do nothing (what's there to do? nothing is open and this is "family time"). let's say at five, i am now hungry, well all restaurants close after lunch (around 5) and do not reopen until 8 or nine. bars too. because they assume that instead of madly studying away i have been having a luxurious luncheon savoring all sorts of delicious cuisine and do not need nutrition any time between 4 and 9 (because, who eats then?)
or let's say it's friday afternoon (afternoon here is from 3-8 by the way). after a brief siesta we go out for some tapas, and if we are out long enough, maybe grab a meal. then there are four hours (more or less) of time between dinner and going out. it's too long a quantity of time to stay out, especially because those spanish dont emerge from their homes until 11 at the earliest, so it's either hanging out with drunk american students in tourist bars or heading home for a nap...we usually go for option two. have you any idea how difficult it is to motivate yourself to get back out there after a few tapas, a few vinos, a glorious 2 hour movie and a nice snooze?
i use these examples merely to demonstrate my americanness clashing with the spanish culture. they feel productive when they work for four, five hours (with a three hour break in the middle) but i feel like a total slacker after 5 hours of school and only an hour of studying. for a spaniard, this is above and beyond what is necessary to be productive and thus were i spanish i would probably spend the rest of the evening sitting in a cafe, bar, or various restaurants passing the time watching the leaves change colors and the beer warm on my table. they only have so many hours of productivity per day, and i'm just used to a lot more.
it's been really hard to slow myself down, and to teach myself that it's ok to do nothing and enjoy it sometimes. especially after 24 years of having to GO GO GO, i'm really trying to savor the flavors of life. i like to think of myself as a relatively relaxed person (i say RELATIVELY) but here i'm like a total neurotic freak that has to do stuff all the time. oh well, i'm finding myself, slowly but surley...because apparently spending a whole week working on your tan is a commendable passing of the time...go me.
(karin i await your "at least you dont have to work" email, i know i know i sound like a whiny vacationer, but like the blog description says, this is about cultural learning and they just do things different from me. any complaints in this blogpost are merely for the purpose of demonstrating cultural differences and are in no way meant to imply that i am not taking full advantage of my unemployed status in a foreign country.)
2 comments:
Wow... if YOU'RE feeling neurotic there, I don't think I could hack it. This sounds remarkably similar to my Christmas/New Year's Caribbean Cruise - by the time I finally (sort of) got used to the "island time" feel of the whole thing, it was time to go back to work. And LET ME TELL YOU, reintroduction into the real world was about as fun as a blind monkey giving me an enema.
Um...I felt this way when I moved from NYC to SF and sometimes I still have to force myself to chiiiilll out here. I cant imagine having to deal with spanish people time.
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