For example, lunchtime. Imagine we have a couple of friends, one British and one Spanish, that have just met and decide to go for lunch together. They agree to meet at restaurant XXX the following Monday for lunch. These two friends, unfortunately, are never going to have lunch together. Why? Because they haven't specify what time is "lunchtime".
The following Monday the British friend gets to the restaurant at 12 pm, lunchtime, and waits for a while and leaves quite unhappy with his/her new found friend for not coming to the date and for not calling either.
On the same Monday the Spanish friend gets to the restaurant at 2 pm, lunchtime, and waits for a while and leaves also very unhappy with his/her new found friend for not coming to the date and for not calling either.
Therefore you should bear in mind the following:
- Breakfast is the food that we Spaniards eat at home around 7.30 am.
- Breakfast is also the break that we have at work around 10.30-11 am, very annoying when you go to the bank/city hall/police station etc and there is only one person to help the queue as the other colleague is having breakfast.
- Lunch is the food that we have in the middle of the day. The middle of the day for Spanish is from 2 pm to 4-5 pm. All that period of time is called "medio día". Even if at 1 pm we would say "la una de la tarde", we do not consider that to be the afternoon because we haven't have lunch, therefore is still morning.
- Merienda is the food we have between lunch time and dinner time. Around 6 pm.
- Dinner is the food that we have at night time, anything from 8 to 11 pm.
Also bear in mind the following:
- We have been taught at school the words "breakfast", "lunch" and "dinner" as the times when you have food during the day. We have not been taught about "tea time". If you invite us for "tea" at your place we will expect you to serve a hot beverage, not food. If we invite you for "tea", do not expect food either.
- If you are telling us at 12 pm that you are having dinner, we will think that you are not having more food the rest of the day, because dinner is what you eat at night time, not at lunch time. To have dinner at 12 pm and tea at 5 pm means that you are starving yourself, as you are only having food once a day and then drinking the hot beverage tea ...
- We don't have afternoon and evening. We have "tarde" that goes from 5 pm until we have dinner at night and/or it gets dark. We were taught at school that "afternoon" was "tarde" and "evening" was "noche" (night time). Therefore, if we are asking you to meet in the afternoon, we dont mean at 4 pm, we mean 6-7 pm.
Me and my non British friends have encounter some funny situations. For example, one of my Czech friends was coming back to her country from UK. She was living with a family and they told her they were going to have some tea to say goodbay. My friend met with us for a goodbye dinner before she was meeting the family, as she only was going to have tea with them afterwards. When she got home the family was waiting for her with a 4 course special meal. She had to eat it all, as she couldn't tell them she had already eaten, as it would have been very impolite after the effort the family made for her.
The other day I decided to invite some English friends to a bbq in my new home in Spain. So I told them we could either do a Spanish lunchtime bbq (by that I meant around 3 pm) or an British dinner time or very early Spanish dinner (by that I meant around 6 pm). As I used the word "dinner" my friends understood that I was saying "3 pm as in Spanish lunch time which is 3 pm British dinner time on weekends". 3 pm it is then!
Another day I agreed to meet the same friends in the afternoon in a coffee shop and for a play date. My friend called me at 3.30 pm to say they were already there, and I responded we were still in the middle of lunch, and that my intention was to meet around 6 pm.
Bearing in mind that I have lived 8 years in UK and that my English is pretty good, and that she has lived nearly 2 years in Spain and speaks Spanish, you would have thought we should know better!
A lot of things get lost in translation, so when you decide to meet with someone from another country make sure you agree in the actual time that you are meeting!
