How much does Spain's time zone influence its culture of late meals and nights?
Answered by Lucas Villar, lives in Spain,
Spaniards will tell you our schedule is our time zone fault, because it is an Iberian thing to think anything unique about us is a defect. It goes deep within our mindset, we do it unconsciously and it's a big issue because we have plenty of unique stuff to deny. Some unique stuff is worse, but plenty of it, specially cultural stuff is not worse.
Evidently Franco's “new” time zone does affect our schedule, but blaming it on that is an excuse. Our schedule is not one hour behind the rest, it's a LOT more.
Franco moved Spain's time zone to the German-Italian one, the same that almost all continental Europe has in fact, Central European Standard Time (CEST). But our geographic zone is that of western France and Brirain, one hour later. Our official hour is one hour ahead of our natural hour, so when we say 9, it's actually 8.
— The idea most people defend is that this causes Spaniards' lateness. That we are not really late, simply our official hour is wrong so it looks like we are.
Let's check this. When I was in Ireland, I had dinner around 6:30 pm, also depending on when I arrived home or if I had to wait for my adoptive “brother and sister” but never later than 7. In Spain I have dinner at 9:30-10:30 also depending on when I get home, and it can be later than that if I am having dinner with friends, although never earlier than that. Is this 1 hour ahead of us? No! It's like 3 hours. Let's move our time zone to the Irish one where we belong, I'd be having dinner at 8:30-9:30 and later with friends, that is not 6:30 by any approximation, that is still 2 hours later than our proper time zone. If we're honest, at 6:30 we're finishing merienda, we're not starting dinner by any means.
Now, half of Spain is on the same geographic zone as France, in fact, the most inhabited half of Spain is on the same geographic zone as France! And the French don't have our schedule. The people in Barcelona don't eat at the same time as those in Nantes do they? Nantes, Reims, Bourdeaux… all have the mistaken time zone too and they should eat at the same time as Valencia, Zaragoza or Barcelona. But they don't.
In fact I'm pretty sure the southern French have a more similar schedule to us than the Irish, but Ireland is more western than France right? So logically, Ireland should be closer to our schedule if it depended on time zone, why isn't it? Because it's simply not a time zone thing, southern France is closer to our schedule because they are closer to our culture even when they are more eastern than the Irish.
But the thing that proves my point definitely is the fact that it's not just the schedule but everything that is different. Our big meal is lunch and even if we don't have a siesta, we did have it for centuries and we still have some free time after lunch. That means our schedule is pushed back, because our meals themselves are different and our way of organising the day is different, it is bound to be later than people in our time zone because we do different things that take time. And that has nothing to do with the official hour it has to do with lifestyle.
How much does the wrong time zone affect our schedule?
Well it does exaggerate our lateness, it pushes us one hour late. But we are far later than that, so it does highlight it but it does not create it. We are late because we are the sunniest country in Europe after Malta and we have a culture in which the day is broken in 2: before lunch and after lunch which is the biggest meal in the centre of the day during the hot afternoon. And that pushes everything behind because that takes time.
And that leads me to a final point I want to make off the topic. We have one of the lowest suicide rates and one of the highest life expectancies, why do we insist on denying our lifestyle and trying to copy provenly worse ones?
When we're different, we don't even stop to consider if that difference is good, we inherently take it as a flaw to eliminate. When I come home from abroad I am very happy to come back to sleeping later, it makes me feel I lived the day not survived it.
Original source: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Spains-time-zone-influence-its-culture-of-late-meals-and-nights
