Expanding Worldview #1

For my first expanding worldviews, I'm going to dig into Spain's lifestyle vs Americans lifestyles. We studied up on Spain's lifestyle before we went to prepare ourselves but it's nothing compared to actually experiencing it firsthand. One of the main differences in our lifestyles is eating out. Normally, Americans only expect to take about an hour at dinner unless its a special event or a large group. But in Spain you are lucky to finish eating in an hour even if the restaurant is dead. Me and two other friends went to eat one night before a bull fight so it was around 5pm or 6pm and the restaurant was dead. There was probably only one other table in there with people. We were super excited because we only had an hour to eat and make it to the bull fight on time. Well, our waiter decided he was hungry too and sat down and ate his dinner after he served us ours. We were finished with our meal and he was still eating. There was no one around paying any attention to us to give us our checks. This is when I start wishing I knew how to speak Spanish! You would never catch a waiter in America doing that without getting fired. Needless to say, we were late to the bullfight and i went back and asked a Spanish speaking student the next day how to ask for the check.

We never ran into another server who did that. However, we did run into problems eating out the entire time we were in Spain. There was times I was ready to order within 10 minutes of sitting down and our waiter wouldn't come back to take our order for 45 minutes after we sat down. There were other times when we were expected to mingle with the locals instead of just trying to order, eat, and then leave. Overall, eating out in Spain is very different than eating out in America. It was frustrating at first but then we realized we're experiencing a different lifestyle and we learned to just embrace it.