Wasting time, by Emma King

     When preparing to come to Spain, many people in the United States informed me that Spaniards are much more relaxed. Some of my friends who had visited Spain before, even went so far to say that they didn't understand how many Spaniards made a living, because walking around, it appears that no one is working. When I first arrived, I felt the exact same way. It made no sense to me how people spent hours of their day sitting with family and friends at a restaurant or café and still made a living. Furthermore, when I went to a restaurant here, I was surprised how unrushed my meal was and how the waiters waited for me to wave them down to approach my table. For the first month, I repeatedly would think about how this relaxed approach to life would never work in America and would find myself looking down on it, even though I really enjoyed it.
After we learned about ethnocentrism in class, I recognized this was skewing my perception of Spain. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed my relaxed meals and loved that people spent so much face-to-face time with each other, I was looking down on it solely because it was different from America's norms. In America, taking one's time is often viewed as wasting time and is looked down upon, which was jading my experience of different practices. After I recognized this, it made me fully enjoy and participate in these new cultural norms. I love that I eat long meals with my host family and that going for a coffee with a friend can turn into a multiple hour event. It is so wonderful how people truly cherish time with others, and I will greatly miss the more relaxed approach to life when I return to the United States.