Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:

p.s. when Dad was still on active duty (USAF pilot) we spent some time in Spain. This was back in the '60's & it took a while for us to get used to the 'siesta' culture (we lived in a hotel in Madrid). The entire city would shut down in the early afternoon & then come back to life much later in the day. I still remember cruising around w/ the family in taxi our 1st night there trying to find a restaurant that opened before 8PM! Later on I worked one summer at a Furr's Cafeteria. In order to get more hours I worked a split-shift. I would come in at 1100 & leave (so-called lunch break) at 1400, & then come back at 1700 & leave at 2200.


Things have changed a bit in Spain but not much. Many small businesses still close from 14:00 to 17:00, but the big ones and the mall-like areas don't. Proper Restaurants serving dinner before 21:00 are still rare (hey, there is no demand, hence no supply), but there are restaurant chains with other standards. The siesta has mostly disappeared, but sleeping patterns have not changed. Which means that practically the entire nation suffers from sleep deprivation (might explain a thing or two) and Sunday mornings, where many people "catch up", are very, very quiet in most parts of the country.

I was back in central (deep) Spain for a couple of years around 2002 (I mean working there at University---I am quite frequently in Spain). My Department colleagues would go for lunch at 14:00 and have a long, heavy meal with red wine, which made working again before 17:00 kind of hard. I had lost that particular custom already. After a while I switched to eating a sandwich over my keyboard, and social contacts be damned. However, even today, and even if it is a light lunch I prefer, I will not get hungry until 14:00. When I need to have lunch with a German colleague, I just call it breakfast.

Btw, and back to the Trav discussion, it is argued that the reason for this problems is that Spain is in the wrong time zone. And, believe it or not, that seems to be the fault of our last dictator aligning the clock with the last German dictator. Wait, let me find an English version of the news... there:

http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/09/29/inenglish/1380456922_121699.html

So if you impose an external calendar on a planet, you might end up with a permanently jet-lagged population, at least on some areas.


Carlos Alos-Ferrer
Professor of Economics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de