In Oviedo . . . It's Often too Early for Lunch but Never too Early to Drink!

We've been in Oviedo for one week, and in that week I've made a few observations about the culture of the place. While the conclusions below are definitely preliminary, one of the things I love so much about living in different places is how you can learn from the ways that people do things in other cultures. So, observation one: while it's often too early for lunch in Oviedo, it's never too early (or too late) to drink. More after the jump.

What I'm noticing about Oviedo so far:

1) Lunch starts late, drinking starts early (and goes on and on)

At the end of our first week here, Jana and I decided to go out for lunch with the LL. The LL woke up late, so we figured we'd go to lunch around noon at a place a few blocks away called Tierra Astur which serves up classic Asturian cuisine and many people have mentioned it as a great place to eat traditional regional food. The LL could nap after lunch, and the schedule that is shaping up for us on a day to day basis could be maintained. Great plan. But . . .

It turns out that full-blown restaurants (I say this because there are also tapas oriented places that tend to do things on a different schedule) don't really start lunch until 1. 1PM for lunch is not unreasonable, but that won't work for a pre-nap meal. And that is really, really different from what we're used to in Knoxville. While it's not crazy to have a 1PM opening time for lunch, when you pair this with the fact that we've observed people out on terraces drinking hard cider, beer, wine, etc. as early as 10AM, it becomes at least a little amusing. If you want a drink at noon, that is clearly not a problem. But if you'd like some food with that drink, no such luck. Oh, and the drinking truly does go on and on. We live on a very quiet street by day. But it is a club/party street by night (thank God for really good windows that keep out the noise). The party, and, by extension, the drinking goes on past 5AM on Saturday nights/Sunday mornings. So I guess that says something about exactly how early in the day 1PM really is!

2) People in Oviedo are exceedingly friendly and polite

I come from the midwestern US. People are nice in the midwest, but many of them are what I call "fake nice." They are polite to your face but stab you in the back when you're not around. That may be the case here, but superficially at the least people are really nice. Two specific situations I observed.

First, I went the the store to buy a few things including apples. Well, the way it works here is that you pick out your produce, you put it in a little bag, you weigh it and put the code in, and a sticker gets spit out by the scale saying how much it costs. That's the only way to do it. Cashiers have no ability to price produce. I knew this, as I had watched people doing it this way. (I'm very good at observing what others do in places where I don't speak the language well so as not to avoid making a fool of myself. Well, usually.) This time I forgot. I got to the front of the grocery store line with a bag of apples and no price sticker. Did the cashier give me a dirty look? No. Did people in line sneer at the stupid foreigner? No. (Though that would have been an accurate assessment.) The cashier says not to worry at all. To go back and get the sticker and she would continue with my check-out when I returned. Others in line could check out while I did what I needed to do and I could cut the line when I returned.

Second, I dropped the LL off at daycare one morning this week and observed an absolute moron trying to parallel park in a spot on my route back to the apartment. No joke, there were 11 cars lined up behind this guy and this was not exactly a busy street. He had clearly been at this for a while. As I was walking by, he was making his apparently umpteenth attempt at backing into this spot, and they delivery driver behind him decided to try to get by before the attempted parker reversed again. The parking driver (I think) backed into the delivery driver. I was just waiting to see what would happen. I expected the delivery guy to jump out of his van screaming. Nope. He looks calmly out the window and suggests the guy pull up so the delivery guy can go around and maybe so the rest of the line can go by too while the parker gets his act together for another attempt (I heard most of this conversation from about 5 feet away, think I understood for the most part). Was there honking? Yes. One honk from the delivery guy as he was getting backed into. But from the line of 11 cars waiting for this guy to figure out how to park? Not one honk. Jana was definitely not in that line of cars. She would have (appropriately) broken her horn honking at this guy.

So people are nice here.

3) The city of Oviedo is a point of pride and is really beautiful

This city is proud. They keep things really clean, even after the big Saturday night party with lots of broken bottles and such, the cleaners come through early Sunday and get it back to spic and span. The architecture is really amazing. They have great old buildings of course, but they also have cool modern architecture mixed in appropriately. It makes for a very urbane and beautiful setting to live and walk in. Their public spaces are fantastic. Great, well manicured parks. Places for the kids to play and the dogs to walk (and there are many of both). They have dozens of public art displays, which are generally sculptures deposited around the city on sidewalks. I'll have to show you some pictures of those at some point. I'll collect them for a few weeks.

4) There is a perplexing juxtaposition of formality and partying

Go anywhere in Oviedo in the middle of the day and you'll think this is the most buttoned down city on the planet. Everything is orderly, the people dress quite conservatively, everyone is friendly but formal. All is clean and calm. It's just plain peaceful. But at 11PM things change, at least in some neighborhoods such as ours. The bars (the real party bars, not just cider and beer places) open. The students from the university come out to play. And they play loudly for a long time. They keep going until 6AM. They drink. They yell. It's safe to say the party starts way too late for me. Maybe I'll join in at the end some morning if I wake up early. I'm guess I'm really old.

5) It's dense here

I was comparing Knoxville and Oviedo the other night while Skyping with my parents. Knoxville population=182,000 in city proper. Oviedo=225,000. Pretty similar. Then how in the world can I walk to absolutely everything I need within 10 minutes? I cannot do that at home, even if I live downtown (almost in downtown but not quite). It's all about the density. Knoxville: 701 per square km. Oviedo: 12,000 per square km. Wow!! Are people crawling all over each other in Oviedo? To some extent, yes. There are not really yards here. The apartments are smaller than at home. But the parks are better. The public spaces are better. It's different for sure, and I definitely value the inherent walkability that comes with greater density.

Like I said before, this is based on one little week. We'll see how my conclusions about Oviedo change as time goes along, but as it stands now there is much to appreciate in our temporary home in Spain.