I’ve been keeping a collection of observations on life in Spain. Large and small differences from a lifetime’s experience in the U.S.

As ever, a couple of caveats: 1) I’m making no complaints here, just pointing out what’s different. 2) It’s possible that most of these practices are prevalent throughout Europe. But I can only speak to what we’re seeing in Spain up to now.

So, here’s another TL;DR update for you all. Buen provecho.

1 Go weigh those tomatos and come back

It’s something that’s changing in Spain, but once upon a time it was your job — and only your job — to report to the grocer check-out how much your produce weighed.

These days they’re migrating to weighing things at the check-out. But we’ve been going to Carrefour, one of the largest grocery chains, and they just won’t finish ringing up your groceries until you have your tomatos and cucumbers weighed, bagged, and tagged with a sticker that displays a bar code, made by a fancy dual-purpose-scale-and-sticker-printer. Should you fail to do this before check out, you’re likely to end up sheepishly hustling back to produce to find that dualie scale while annoyed shoppers behind you wait at check out for your hasty return.

Seems only ignorant foreigners, like me, say, are dumb enough to get in line without having tallied the weight and cost of one’s veggies. Trust me on this.

2 Mind the crosswalk

There’s a primary school across from our place. The denizens make a beautiful noise from about 11am to 5pm. Take one screaming child and you’ll get a rather insufferable headache. But take 100 screaming children and it’s something like crashing waves, one after another. A lovely background noise.

This crosswalk is specific to school kids, referencing the walk (camino) to school (al cole). And it’s respected like every crosswalk in Spain. All crosswalks here are strictly given over to the pedestrian, whether child or adult. Step foot in a crosswalk here with a car approaching and the car slows or comes to an immediate stop. The converse involves stepping into the street where there is no crosswalk. Drivers can be visibly annoyed at these street-crossing protocol breaches.

The crosswalks in Córdaba are ubiquitous. In my neighborhood, there just aren’t that many intersections meeting at regular angles. There are no stop signs, really, and almost no traffic signals. The crosswalk formalizes where we pedestrians have the right of way in the absence of an orderly grid of regularly spaced streets.

3 There’s something in the air

And it’s neither birds nor romance nor Phil Collins. It’s wires. So many wires.

I imagine the U.S. was like this in the past. There wasn’t underground everything always, like they’re doing now. If your house is anything more than 20 years old, there’s a network of poles and cables behind your house bringing you power and telephone. These days you’re probably getting your Internet from a pole strung to your roof.

Yet, in Córdoba, there aren’t really alleys or right-of-ways behind houses. One building abuts another directly. So the wires cross streets and traipse over facades and get painted the color of the house until they aren’t noticed. The braids of accumulating strands which accomodate mutliple dwellings get pretty hefty.

Even so, after 3 months I’m pretty much not seeing this anymore, what’s right there. Maybe it’s the paint. Maybe I don’t care if critical infrastructure carries on its business in plain sight. But it’s fun to marvel at when the cables multiply into braids large enough to adorn a very large Wendy’s sign.

4 What’s in a cadence?

Your phone number, to start. Nm-nm-nm / Nm-nm-nm / Nm-nm-nm-nm. Right? Isn’t that how you say your phone number with area code? And, as you know, you have a country code in the U.S. as well. It’s 001 or +1 or simply 1. Like 1-800-zip-adoo.

They have a country code here in Spain, too. But it doesn’t have that U.S. ring of primacy. It’s +34. And the number, the actual phone number you get here, is nine digits long, not 10, as in the U.S.

And the cadence? There are two rhythms to choose from in Spain. Nm-nm-nm / Nm-nm-nm / Nm-nm-nm. (3×3) Or… Nm-nm-nm / Nm-nm / Nm-nm / Nm-nm. (3x2x2x2) It makes the head spin. I still don’t know which cadence is right. Is it 3x3x3 or 3x2x2x2? You see both here in a phone number that’s written down. Take the phone numbers of the utilities we signed up for recently. Under Contact on their web pages.

But I’m on the case. And just as soon as I am able to have a proper conversation with a fellow Spaniard in proper Spanish I will figure this out and report back. In the meantime, it’s just another peculiarility of living in Spain. Or Europe. I’ll let you know that, too.

5 The siesta

I wrote a little bit about the siesta in a previous post, but it definitley warrants a little more explication. The siesta is simply a downtime in the afternomon which most businesses recognize and follow. The siesta is not a reduction in active hours in a day. It just shifts the active hours. The siesta in Córdoba can start between 1 and 2pm and end between 4:30 and 6pm, depending on the business. To my knowledge, no regulation governs when a business opens or closes for siesta. Active professional hours resume around 5pm. So working people can still do their business in the evening, to overcome the absence of office hours in the afternoon. Sounds fair to me.

The siesta is pretty widespread in Córdoba, but there are certainly exceptions. E.g., all large grocery stores are open all day.

A common theory about the origin of the siesta is that it supplied a refuge from the hottest part of the day. Agricultural workers, domestics doing the business of the household, or people of commerce going to and from business establishments, could retreat to the relative cool of indoors and wait out the inferno. In Andulacia, where temps around 110 F in July and August are not uncommon, this is eminently sensible.

For los dos, the siesta is sort of a head scratcher. It’s not universal so it’s possible to patronize a business in the afternoon, but quite unpredictable. The siesta seems more of a tradition today than a necessity. Pretty sure it’s not undertaken in the rest of Europe.

As one might imagine, siesta is also lunch time in Andalucía. The mid-day meal is around 2pm. The evening meal is around 9 or 10pm. Restaurants don’t follow the 2 to 5pm siesta. Instead, restaurants are typically open from 1 to 5pm, then close until 8 or 9pm. This makes good business and cultural sense, but you have to wonder about those restaurant workers feeding Andalucía in the mid-day heat. ¡Ay, caramba!

So there’s another “bet you didn’t know” item in all this: Spain eats late! Los dos have yet to head out for dinner at 9 or 10pm. Our own tradition of eating at 6 or 7pm is just too entrenched, I guess.

6 Cold lava

The Spanish verb for wash is lavar. So you get the verb stem lava- in connection with all things washing. Like lavado, which means either washing or the wash. (Context is everything.) Or lavador, which means washer, as in washer/dryer. My favorite contraption whose name is based on lavar is lavavajillas, or dishwasher. We bought both a lavador and lavavajillas when we moved into our appliance-free apartment. (Which is when I spent a good amount of time failing to learn how to pronounce lavavajillas correctly, with its oo-la-la sorta pattern of syllables.)

These appliances might come with both hot and cold water inlets. But mostly they only have cold. Indeed, our apartment doesn’t have connections for both hot and cold in the spaces where the washers go. Only cold. We found this quite strange, but, in the end, just something else to adapt to. The dishwasher has a heating element to make the water hot. Yet, it has no heating element to dry the dishes. The washer does cold water wash. That’s what you get. Brr.

And no dryer. It seems common in Spain to have a clothes washer, but no dryer. So the clothes go on a rack and generally dry over night. Things are a tad stiff coming off the drying rack, but quickly soften up upon wearing.

7 Glorieta Hallelujah!

Or, all hail the almighty roundabout! So common in Europe. But really only common in the newer parts of town. We live in a pretty old part of the city. We don’t see many roundabouts. I imagine that a properly functioning roundabout takes a bit of planning, that getting streets at multiple angles to converge around a round center takes some doing. But driving about Córdoba, especially in the outer business district and in the neighborhood we first inhabited in our AirBnb, glorietas proliferate.

The roundabouts here are definitely intimidating at first. When to yield? When to push in? How to get to the inside of the circle then to the outside? But really they just take a little practice and a modicum of courage before you’re feeling like a pro. Besides, as I said to los dos numero uno, no one actually wants to collide with you so, if you will yourself into the moving traffic, it’s pretty unlikely someone’s going to hit you.

The beauty of the roundabout is that they do away with left turns. Goodbye left turn lanes. No cars blocking traffic waiting to turn left. No traffic signals, for the most part. Some of the largest roundabouts have a red/green signal to temper the flow of cars into the circle. Most do not. Enter at will.

All in all, there’s just not many left-turn situations in Córdoba. At least not in my experience to date. Left turns are also averted by small byways parallel to a main road. You have to slide off to the right, onto a smaller parallel road, then wait to turn left onto the main road. Like in the below.

8 Strap yo cap!

After a bit of interneting I learned that the law in Spain, requiring that plastic container caps be connected to said containers, is relatively new. I definitely don’t remember navigating my lips around the top of a water bottle in this manner when we were here touring in 2023. But now pretty much everything plastic has a handy — or not so handy — tether to keep the cap with the bottle.

It seems a study found that 6% of waste on European beaches are loose beached caps. Holy cap! Imagine what kind of junk in the environment, across Europe, this measure saves!

Hasta la próxima, amigos!