Hola todos! Four weeks in, and I think it is finally time to have an honest conversation about culture shock. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies, where someone lands in a foreign country and immediately melts down over not being able to find a cheeseburger. The quieter kind, where little things accumulate over days and weeks until one evening you find yourself standing on a sidewalk getting bumped into from every direction, stomach growling at 9pm because dinner will not be ready for another hour, and you think to yourself, “okay, so this is just how life works here.” That has been week four in a nutshell, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Let me start with food, because in Spain, food is never just food. It is a lifestyle, a schedule, and an entire philosophy rolled into one. Back home in the United States, dinner at 6:30pm is completely normal. Dinner at 8pm means you had a busy day. Here in Madrid, showing up to dinner at 8pm means you are eating with the grandparents and the tourists. Real dinner, the kind Valentina and her family sit down for together, does not happen until 10pm at the earliest, and on weekends it can drift even later than that. The first week I was here I was genuinely convinced I was going to pass out from hunger every single evening, because my body had been trained for nearly two decades to expect food at a completely different time. I have gotten better at it, I will say that, but there is still a part of my brain that panics a little every night around 7pm when there is no food on the horizon and everyone around me seems completely unbothered. The food itself, once it finally arrives, is absolutely worth the wait. Between the jamón, the croquetas, the patatas bravas and the fresh seafood, I have eaten better here than almost anywhere I have ever been. But getting my internal clock to accept that dinner is a late night event and not an early evening one has been one of the more genuinely challenging adjustments of the summer.

Then there is the pace of life on the streets, which is its own kind of adaptation. Madrileños walk slowly. I do not mean a leisurely stroll on a Sunday afternoon kind of slowly. I mean a full, unhurried, completely unapologetic commitment to taking their time that applies on Monday mornings on crowded sidewalks just as much as it does on weekend afternoons in the park. As someone who grew up moving at a pretty quick clip everywhere I went, navigating the streets of Madrid during rush hour has required a genuine rewiring of my instincts. And closely tied to that is the personal space situation, or more accurately, the complete absence of one. Spanish culture is warm and physical in a way that Americans simply are not conditioned for. People stand close, touch your arm mid conversation, greet each other with kisses on both cheeks without a second thought, and generally occupy shared space in a way that took some serious getting used to. I have had more strangers brush past me, lean over me, and make casual physical contact with me in four weeks here than I think I experienced in my entire last year at Pitt. It is not rude, and I understand that now, it is just genuinely different, and learning to read that difference rather than react to it has been one of the more interesting personal challenges of this experience.

In the workplace, both of these cultural realities show up in ways I did not fully anticipate. The slower, more relationship driven pace of Spanish professional culture means that meetings often start with real conversation, checking in on people, asking about their weekend, talking about food. At first I kept treating that time as something to politely sit through before the actual work started, and I slowly realized that for my Spanish colleagues, that part was the actual work. Building trust and connection is not a preamble to doing business here, it is part of doing business, and once I started leaning into that instead of trying to fast forward through it, my interactions with the team got noticeably better. It is a lesson I think a lot of American professionals could genuinely benefit from.

Now, on a significantly more exciting note, this past weekend a group of us from the program took a trip down to Sevilla and Córdoba, and I have to be honest, it might have been the best two days I have had since arriving in Spain. Sevilla is one of those cities that does not feel real when you are standing in it. We visited the Plaza de España, which if you have never seen it, is this massive, sweeping semicircular plaza built in 1929 that lines a canal you can actually row boats through, with hand painted tile alcoves representing every province in Spain along the walls. It is genuinely one of the most beautiful places I have ever stood in my life, and I must have taken about a hundred photos before I even made it halfway around. We also visited the gardens of the Real Alcázar, which any Game of Thrones fan will recognize immediately as the Water Gardens of Dorne, and walking through them felt surreal in the best possible way. Seeing something you have watched on a screen for years suddenly exist right in front of you, with fountains and orange trees and centuries of history surrounding you, is a feeling that is pretty hard to put into words.

From Sevilla we made our way to Córdoba, which has a completely different energy but is just as unforgettable. The main event there was the Mezquita, a cathedral that was originally built as a mosque in the eighth century and is one of the most remarkable pieces of architecture I have ever seen. You walk inside and are immediately surrounded by hundreds of red and white striped arches stretching out in every direction, and right in the middle of it all sits a full Catholic cathedral that was built directly into the structure centuries later. The combination of Islamic and Christian architecture sharing the same space is something that you genuinely cannot prepare yourself for, and standing inside it I kept thinking about how much history had passed through that building and how small my four weeks in Spain felt by comparison. It was the kind of perspective that a weekend trip can give you that a regular workweek simply cannot, and I came back to Madrid on Sunday night feeling recharged, grateful, and very ready to take on whatever week five has in store.

¡Hasta la próxima!