So, we’ve been living in Spain for nearly a month now. In that time, our schedule went like this:
- 6am-Mike wakes up, Mandy’s in bed
- 7am-Mike leaves the house, Mandy’s in bed
- 8am-Mandy makes her way out of bed and hangs out with the dogs/on the computer/around the house
- 12 noon-Mandy is hungry so she eats a snack
- 3:30pm-Mike comes home for the day, they eat lunch together
- 4:30-Mike works out
- 6pm-They aren’t hungry
- 7pm-They aren’t hungry
- 8pm- Kinda hungry, but not sure if they want to spend an hour cooking, then eating, then going to bed
- 9pm-OMG Starving, need food in my face now. Since dinner was never cooked, look in cabinets and refrigerator for 20 minutes, hoping something delicious and quick tackles me. Settle for something quick and healthy, like nutella on cookies. Or, if we do cook dinner at 8pm, finish eating around 9:30
- 10:30pm-Bedtime. Feel terrible because we just ate dinner and don’t sleep well, or feel terrible because my dinner consisted of Nutella and cookies for the third night in a row.
Besides the bedtime at 10:30, this is the way most people live their day-to-day lives here in our region. They don’t eat dinner until 9:30 and then go to bed maybe around midnight or one.
But…Mike gets up at 6am to get ready for work. Most people don’t start their days here until 9am. That makes a big difference! We aren’t night owls by nature, and staying up past 11 isn’t for us on a daily basis when he’s getting up early. I also really loved the ritual of cooking dinner around 5 or 6 oclock, eating and having the rest of the night to do whatever we pleased, be it run errands or hang out at home.
The Spanish schedule was making my days feel so off. I thought I would adjust after a couple of weeks, but we found that we just didn’t like the way this schedule was making us feel.
So here’s what we decided. Mike’s going to eat lunch/snacks at work. I’ll eat lunch/snacks at home. He’ll come home at 3:30, work out, and then be ready to help me cook dinner by about 6. We’ll cook dinner, and be happy having the evenings to relax before bedtime.
It will be very difficult to go out to eat on a regular basis. Here, many restaurants don’t even OPEN until 9pm. Add to that the fact that eating dinner out here usually takes a MINIMUM of 2.5 hours since the service is slower and no one is ever in a rush. Add in there about 20-30 minutes of driving to said location both ways and it’s impossible to get home at a decent hour on weeknights.
Saturdays are the best day to go out to dinner since we can carve out however much time is needed for a meal. Sundays…everything is closed. Only some restaurants are open for lunch on Sundays, but most of those places don’t have websites and you don’t know that it’s closed until you get there and you’re fire-breathingly hungry.
Now, the way a lot of the Spanish offset their eating/sleeping schedules is by taking a siesta in the middle of the afternoon, aka: taking a nap.
I think that’s stupid. I don’t want to break up my day with a nap unless I’m sick or if I’m so tired I might just pass out standing up. Further south in this country, it might make more sense because it’s literally too hot to think in the middle of the day, but here, it remains a steady 50-70 degrees at all times. You don’t need a nap in the middle of the day if you eat and go to bed at a decent hour, now do you?
So…we tried the Spanish way of eating. We agreed that it wasn’t sustainable for the long-term, and since we’re eating at home all of the time now anyway, we might as well do it on our terms. When we do decide to go out to eat, we’ll plan that day accordingly.
Do you think you could adjust to this kind of eating schedule? Would you take a nap in the middle of the day just to make it work?
