After traveling to another city literally every weekend (and even another country during the week), I finally decided to stay put this past weekend. While many of my peers went to Sevilla, my new friend Ashley and I stayed back to enjoy what the outdoors of Madrid has to offer. We went hiking at La Pedriza de Manzanares, which required an hour-long bus ride that was free with our transit card. The highlight of this experience was definitely eating tortilla de patata after working up an appetite while overlooking the mountainous countryside. This past week has consisted of a myriad of other adventures, including but not limited to: making local friends at a community-run language exchange event, exploring local parks, celebrating both USA and Spain’s landslide World Cup victories, and attending a block party where the municipality-sanctioned end time was past 3am.
When thinking of the parts of Spanish culture I find hardest to adapt to, what comes to mind immediately is the schedule, particularly with regard to meals. Anyone who knows me knows I am a huge breakfast person, so finding that Spain doesn’t really do breakfast was pretty disappointing for me. I’ve been substituting my typical eggs and bacon for a bagel or cereal. Then I have to wait until around 2pm to eat lunch, which is far later than my preference. Then another long wait: dinner isn’t served until 9:30pm! I’ve had to adapt by eating lots of snacks throughout the day and figuring out what keeps me full.
The pace in general has been a bit hard to adjust to. At a restaurant, you practically have to flag down the waiter to ask for the check; there’s no constant How was your food? Can I get you anything else? I’m used to restaurants in the US trying to get you out the door quickly so they can seat their next customers, but here sobremesa – just sitting around at the table after eating – is part of the culture. This works when I’m sitting around with my friends, but not so much when we have a second destination lined up and nobody is helping us get there. Also, everyone walks so slow, which is very hard for me (I am a fast walker AND I tend to run late).
I’ve also observed similar pacing differences within the workplace. Deadlines are pretty flexible and nobody seems to be urgently concerned about most of our work. I am planning the social media side of an advocacy campaign, and when looking through the organization’s planning documents it’s a bit surprising to me that we’ve been in the brainstorming stage for this long. Something else I’ve noticed is that summer vacation is very widespread here and happens around the same time for everyone; many of my coworkers are out this entire week (and I was surprised to be the one to inform some of them about the others being gone). However I understand this might be exacerbated because I’m working for a pretty small organization.
Overall, a lot of the most difficult parts of adapting for me have been related to timing. While I do believe my food struggles have been largely biological, I think my other frustrations about time are rooted in me being a particularly overscheduled person within an already hyper-productive American society. I like working on a tight schedule with fixed deadlines. I like packing lots of activities into my day, ranging from academic to extracurricular to social, and I tend to worry about what quick task I could be doing when the moment is idle (even just waiting for a bus for 2 minutes). Here in Spain I’ve encountered a lot more idle time with a lot less worries to fill it with. I’ve been trying to be more okay with leaving that space empty; instead of pulling out my reminders app to see if there’s anything I could check off, or going to Instagram or even listening to music, I’ve been trying to let things be quiet. When you’re used to constant inputs, slowing down is harder than it seems. But as I’ve gotten accustomed to a life outside of the hyper-productive rush of college (that I’ve largely created for myself), I’ve found myself feeling more reflective and more aware of my surroundings. I’m so grateful to have another month to continue noticing.