Spanish schedule

I have a hard time getting used to Spanish schedules. I don’t even know if there is such a thing, if there is a “typical time schedule” in a Spanish household. We go to the park on a Saturday morning around 11am and there are lots of other parents, running errands and spending some time with their kids at the playground. We do that same thing on a Sunday morning at 11am and there is nobody on the streets. However, two hours later they are all out, strolling around and having coffee and some snacks at the bar, at 1pm. We get invited to my in-laws house for Sunday lunch for 2:30pm. We call for a doctor’s appointment for our 5 year old daughter and get one for Friday night at 6pm. Who takes their kids to the doctor’s at 6pm? That tantrum we got did not surprise me at all.

I am confused. And I am tired. Since the German school starts at 8:45am and we have quite a long commute these days, we need to get up early. That means we need to go to bed early. Which means that we are following the American schedule we are used to. At least for the first half of the day. We fail on most days when it comes to early bedtime, though.

Weekdays are different from weekends. Weekdays are a bit easier since we won’t do that much after school. But we still have to run errands. Most places close over lunch time so afternoon errands don’t start before 4pm.  Streets are busy and noisy until late. Days getting longer really doesn’t help either.  L keeps asking me (usually around 8pm) if it was still morning and if she could still play, and why did we not go to the beach but had dinner instead? 

Weekends are even harder when it comes to planning. We usually have breakfast at some point between 8 and 9am. That means that we are hungry again around 1pm. So when we are invited to my mother-in-law for lunch, we eat around 1pm because we are starving. Then we go to her house and have another lunch between 3:30 and 5:30pm. That feels more like dinner for me, but of course, we are not that hungry at that point since it is kind of early for dinner. After lunch, we relax and are never able to leave her house before 7pm. That means we get to have dinner around 9pm and L goes to bed around 9:30pm. If that falls on a Sunday, getting up next day for school at 6:30am is hard.

It all gets easier if we have snack mid morning, which would be around noon. We meet with friends at the park at 11am and then go to the bar at noon, to have “tapas,” little tasty snacks. In that case we might survive till lunch time, but it still doesn’t fix that long afternoon.

But even during the week, people seem to have very long days. We wanted to visit some friends and they are not home until 5:30pm.  So we went to their house at 6pm and left again at 7:30pm. Got home at 8pm and still had not had dinner. That feels too weird. And to think that most people here are not even home from work that early feels weird too. Most people work until 7 or even 8pm. But children don’t seem to follow that schedule. They still go to bed between 8 and 9pm, so most working dads don’t even see their kids during weekdays. And I don't know how working mom is supposed to manage it.

I kind of hope we will be able to follow our American schedule for a long time.