Neighbours
When you are in the middle of buying a property here rather than renting, the identity and nationality of your prospective neighbours- to – be becomes something you should, really, investigate. Nationality – depending on your own lifestyle – can be a huge issue. As a Brit living in Spain I have acclimatised to many things- the cuisine, language, bureaucracy – but one of the changes I have never been able to make was the ‘time’ change to adopt ‘Spanish’ eating habits and times.
Because of the anomaly with clocks – Spain runs an hour later than it should meaning it is always darker, later in the mornings and lighter at night – Spanish people get up ‘late’ and eat ‘late’.
We have never managed to ditch our British ‘rise at six in the morning, eat dinner at six in the evening’ affliction. Which means just as I’m planning on going to bed my neighbours start the frying of olive oil, garlic, chorizo – with accompanied smells and pan clatter. Often they don’t eat til 11 or 12 at the weekend which if there are children around they’ll eat later too.
children of Spanish families are indulged at meal times as well as at every other time, so they’ll be shouting, screaming, attempting to pull the cat’s whiskers out one by one, an their Spanish family will smile sweetly at them and let them carry on. Regardless of the fact that they’re making enough noise to crack masonry at twenty paces. But should you as a ‘guiri’ – a foreigner of lesser standing- try and remonstrate with the parents, they’ll hound you for the rest of your residency as being those scummy brits who impugned the splendidness of their babies.
We have a balcony that overlooks us at the back, 20 meters away from our bedroom window and in August the visitors eat out on that balcony at midnight every night and the two old ladies are often still outside ‘chatting’ – ‘CHATTING’? hah- shouting at each other across the table in machine-gun-staccato-Spanish – over their fourth Rioja at 3 am. So, choose your property wisely and maybe just find out who lives around you. Especially in an apartment, the chairs scraping on the floor for half the night – so I’m told – can be a short cut to temper meltdown. I refuse to go and shout at them in the night (my wife isn’t so polite), preferring an ear plug or, when they really went for it and had guests, we moved to our front bedroom in the middle of the night and let them get on with it. It is their country ….
The hidden benefit of keeping a British timescale is that we aways get to eat first in all of the restaurants in our village which are only just open at 7pm when we rock up, starving, and get to choose tables and everything form the menu. Usually just as we’re finishing the rest of the world comes out to eat at 9 onwards. Love it! No traditionally long – three hour- Spanish repasts for us. How they sleep after eating a mammoth meal at night is beyond me.
We tried changing our body clocks but only ended up eating an extra meal and gaining about 5 kilos! Still, the other advantage is there is absolutely nobody awake at 7 in the morning when I’m up with the dog. It’s like living in a ghost town until about 9. Impossible to try and find a gym open before 8.00 unlike Hertfordshire when gym classes started at 6.00 so everyone could train and be oft work on the 7.45 to Kings Cross. Culturally the Spanish don’t recognise anything which involves them having to get up before 8a m. Ever.
So, don’t plan on an early start for an event – or try and find a cafe open before 8 or a shop open before 9.30.
