Night Owls

I'm not a morning person. Neither is Paula, though she can fake it with enough coffee. A key attraction of our trip to Spain is that the country is populated entirely by night owls.

The daily rhythm of life in Spain apparently goes something like this:

8:00 am      Wake up
9:00 am      Eat breakfast
9:30-ish     Arrive at work
2:00 pm      Eat lunch
4:00 pm      Disappear
7:00 pm      Drinks and tapas
8:00 pm      Shopping
11:00 pm     Dinner
1:00 am      Bed?

So you can plan on four or five small meals scattered throughout the day, all served later than you might expect. This may be partly due to Spain being pretty far back in its time zone. It certainly stayed light very late when we were there in Sepetember.

Note that all times shown above are approximate. One of the striking things about Spain was the absence of clocks. It's hard to picture a British or German town without its large clock tower. In the United States and Canada, practically every bank has a scrolling sign that displays the time and temperature. But in Spain? It's not important. If you listen carefully, you might hear a church bell ringing, but that's done only to signify that time is passing, not what time it actually is.

Most shops don't list hours of operation. You can tell which ones that cater to tourists, because they bother to post small signs saying "Back soon". Don't take it literally. This may mean five minutes or two hours. The sign is just to reassure those with an overdeveloped sense of punctuality. Time, in Spain, just doesn't matter as much.

We found this totally relaxing, especially coming from America's uptight east coast. We're five hours behind London, darn it, which makes us five hours behind. And by golly, we'd better stay three hours ahead of those nuts in California. And that takes work. The planet doesn't turn itself, you know.

Speaking of relaxing, we were never able to figure out why all the shops and restaraunts closed around four or five pm. We used it for naptime. A siesta seemed appropriate, especially if we wanted to go all night. We're Night Owls, but we're a bit out of practice.