it is not the same here LOL

LOL - some of these are 💯% accurate, others might be a bit of an exaggeration. But still, life here is not "lo mismo!" 😁From a FB post of Be Savvy Spain 

Spanish Logic vs Your Logic

You thought you understood how life works…

and then you moved to Spain.

You: I’ll be there at 5.

Spain: Amazing. See you… sometime after 5.

You: Let’s eat early today.

Spain: Of course. 9? Or 9:30?

You: I’ll just pop in quickly.

Spain: Perfect. Block 2–3 hours.

You: Is there a line?

Spain: No line. Say: “¿Quién es el último?” Trust the system. There is always a system.

You: I’ll do this now.

Spain: Ahora… or ahora mismo?

You: The shop is closed?? It’s 2pm.

Spain: Exactly. People are eating. You should be too.

You: I’ll leave in 5 minutes.

Spain: Vale… start saying goodbye. See you in 35.

You: One drink.

Spain: Let’s start with a caña y vamos viendo.

You: Why is everyone talking at the same time?

Spain: Because silence is suspicious.

You: I’ll just get a quick coffee.

Spain: Sit down. Stay a while. Life is happening.

You: Dinner at 6 feels normal.

Spain: That’s… a snack.

You: I need a clear answer.

Spain: You’ll get a story, a suggestion, and a “we’ll see.”

And then one day…

You walk into a place, confidently say

“¿Quién es el último?”

grab a number that doesn’t exist…

and wait like you’ve done this your whole life.

You go from:

“this makes no sense”

to:

“es que aquí funciona así.”

*************************************************

And here is another one from FB page Everything is Boffo and this one is 100% accurate and we LOVE it! (Italics are mine - marking things that really resonate with me about life in Spain.)

Spain Has A Word For The Time After The Meal That Has No Translation.

Once You Understand It, You’ll Wonder How You Ever Ate Without It.

Here’s a fun fact that will reframe your entire relationship with the dining table : the average Spanish lunch lasts between one and a half and two hours. Not because the food takes that long to arrive. Not because the service is slow — though it can be, deliberately, because rushing you out is considered rude. But because in Spain, the meal doesn’t end when the food does. There is a second act. It has a name. And it might be the single most civilized concept in the entire Spanish cultural vocabulary.

La sobremesa.

Literally translated: over the table. What it means in practice is the time spent at the table after eating — talking, drinking coffee, finishing the wine, doing absolutely nothing productive, and considering this not a waste of time but the point of the whole exercise. The food was the opening act. The sobremesa is the performance.

There is no English equivalent. Not because English speakers don’t sometimes linger after meals — they do — but because English-speaking cultures haven’t considered the practice important enough to name. And the things a culture names are the things it values. Spain named this one centuries ago and has been defending it against the encroachment of efficiency ever since.

Here’s what sobremesa actually looks like, because the description can make it sound passive when it is anything but

The last course is cleared. Coffee arrives, or a chupito — a small digestif that appears in many Spanish households and restaurants as a natural conclusion to eating . The conversation, which has been running throughout the meal at the warm, overlapping, everyone-talking-at-once register that defines Spanish social interaction, shifts slightly. It becomes less about the food, more about everything else. The topic doesn’t matter. What matters is the quality of attention the people around the table are giving each other.

Nobody picks up their phone .

Nobody signals that they have somewhere to be.

Nobody performs the sequence of gestures — napkin on table, slight lean back, checking the time — that in other cultures signals the meal is over and life must resume.

In Spain, this moment is life.

The conversation is not a prelude to getting back to something more important. It is the important thing.

The sobremesa can last twenty minutes or three hours . Sunday lunches with family — la comida del domingo — are notoriously capable of extending past 6pm from a table that sat down at 2:30. This is not a complaint. This is a success metric. The longer the sobremesa, the better the meal was — not the food necessarily, but the meal as a complete social event.

There is something psychological happening here that research has started to catch up with. The transition from eating to talking — from the sensory pleasure of the food to the relational pleasure of the conversation — without an intervening moment of dispersal creates a specific kind of intimacy . You are still at the table. The wine is still there. Nobody has reassumed their outside-world identity. You are still, collectively, in the space the meal created. What gets said in sobremesa is often more honest, more vulnerable, more real than what gets said anywhere else.

Spaniards know this instinctively even if they don’t articulate it. The sobremesa is where relationships are actually maintained. Where the important things get said. Where the family argument gets resolved or the business deal gets agreed or the friendship deepens into something more durable. The food got everyone to the table. The sobremesa is why they stayed .

The contrast with other eating cultures is striking. The American working lunch — food as fuel consumed during a meeting so that neither the food nor the meeting wastes time — is the polar opposite of sobremesa as a philosophy. The British habit of eating quickly and separating to different rooms afterward. The Japanese practice of leaving restaurants promptly to free the table for the next reservation. All of these reflect a relationship with time where meals are allocated a slot and then the slot ends. Spain’s relationship with mealtimes is not slotted. It is open-ended. The meal is done when the conversation runs out, and the conversation rarely runs out .

This has practical implications for life in Spain that newcomers consistently underestimate . Business meetings that begin with lunch will not end when the food ends. The sobremesa is not optional time you can excuse yourself from — excusing yourself from sobremesa is excusing yourself from the relationship. The deal, the decision, the trust — these happen here, not in the meeting before. Family obligations around Sunday lunch are not dischargeable because you have other plans at 5pm. Sunday lunch in a Spanish family doesn’t end at a time that can be scheduled around.

And once you’ve had enough sobremesas — enough afternoons that stretched past sunset without anyone noticing, enough conversations that started over coffee and ended with the second bottle of wine and the discovery that the person across from you is considerably more interesting than you’d assumed — you stop seeing the practice as an inefficiency and start seeing it as the only sensible way to eat with other people.

You stop treating meals as transactions and start treating them as occasions.

You stop eating at your desk .

You stop scheduling calls during lunch.

You stop being somewhere else while you’re supposedly having dinner.

The sobremesa doesn’t teach you these things explicitly. It just makes the alternative feel impoverished by comparison. After enough Sunday afternoons at a Spanish table, the quick lunch back home — food consumed in twelve minutes before a 1pm meeting — stops looking like efficiency and starts looking like a life that has decided time with other people is less important than time with a calendar .

It isn’t. Spain has known this for centuries. The rest of the world is slowly catching up .