[DUMBGRUNT]

There goes the old afternoon delight!

[DesertRhino]

That’ll be popular.

[Nextrush]

The nations of the world must conform to the ‘world order’.

[dfwgator]

We’re planning on visiting Spain next year.

One thing we were told is that if you want to buy anything or get some food in the afternoon, you could pretty much forget because everything is closed.

[BenLurkin]

" to bring the country into line with its European counterparts"

The Spanish should tell their "counterparts" to go fly a kite.

[Lurker]

This will not happen. I don’t care what this fool decrees.

[pepsi_junkie]

I lived in southern Spain for a time and there the siesta is alive and well regardless of all the tourism books that say "oh that's in the past, Spain is modern now". To understand the siesta you need to understand a little about Spain. First, they are on the wrong time zone. They should be on the same time as England but they decided to align with the continental time (a.k.a. Brussels). So when it's 8pm in Spain it really SHOULD be 7pm according to the sun. So there's that. Hence they start and end their days "later" than everyone else on the continent but when you look a little deeper it's not so cut and dry.

The other thing is that Spain can be very hot. Their midday sun (wrong time zone so think closer to 2pm) is much more intense than the sun at noon or 1pm in Berlin or Brussels or Paris. A lot of Spanish culture is aligned with avoiding that sun. The streets are close together to encourage shade. They use tile and white washed brick/plaster for construction to reject heat. And socially they evolved to do more of their living in the cooler evening hours after sunset, which because of the wrong time zone thing can be as late as 9 or 10pm in summer. If you spend any time there you will find that they will not eat dinner until well after 9pm, and you will see even children playing outside close to midnight. Many compensate for this by having their main meal at 2pm rather than at night AND/OR they often like to take a nice nap in the afternoon before heading back to work.

Trying to cram Spanish culture into a German clock won't work, IMHO. The Spanish will gladly go home at 6pm but they won't give up their 2 hour lunches. One man's opinion.

[exDemMom]

We were stationed in Spain in the early 80s—my younger son was born there. It was wonderful. Plus, the fact that we worked American hours, but lived in a country that worked Spanish hours meant that everything was open when we got off work. We used to go to dinner at 8 or 9 pm.

The siesta is so much a part of Spanish culture, I just don’t see it going away without a fight. I suspect that effort will go over as well as the switch to the metric system went in the US (even though the metric system is *so much* easier to use).