Mittagspause ("Midday Break")

If you've ever heard the stereotype about Europeans in certain countries, such as Spain, being laid back with time.... Well, it's completely true.

During this month-long intensive language course, we'll all have a 45 minute lunch break every day from 12:15-13:00 .

I usually eat lunch with Marie, a French girl, especially because we have class together, and are better friends with each other within the group. Every day, we typically find me walking at a steady but brisk pace towards the Mensa (the campus cafeteria) in order to make enough time to get there, eat at a comfortable speed, and back before class.

It would probably take me about 8-10 minutes to get to the Mensa, but usually we get there in 15.... because the Europeans I'm with are just not in a hurry. The daily scenario is that I'm a good few steps ahead and usually have to pause my pace every so often so that they can catch up (especially if they're talking).

Not surprisingly, the lack of the time invariably comes to them at a surprise by the time they've sat down with food at the Mensa. I'm done by the time they're halfway through, though we've all got perhaps 10 more minutes to both finish and get all the way back to class. They are shocked that so much time has already elapsed.

Marie tells me about the lunch breaks in France -- minimum of 1 hour, sometimes extending to around 2 hours. She finds it almost outrageous that we only have a 45 minutes lunch break. I don't find it outrageous, but I do find the whole thing kind of funny.

Oh. And let me mention the Spanish students:

Spanish students: "So when you need to go back to class?"
Us: "About 15 more minutes. What about you?"
Spanish students: "Ohh... now. Class started one minute ago." *shrug*

Literally. That was an actual conversation we had. *LOL* And you can bet they won't be back until another 15 minutes, too. I also might mention that Germans are big on punctuality, and consider tardiness to be very rude, so we'll see if this gets interesting further into the month at all!...

45 minutes, though not a great deal of time, is still plenty for me. 45 minutes for the French and Spanish, at least (I should talk to some of the other students and see what they think), is apparently something like writing your doctoral thesis in a week.