[losvedir]

> Not everyone in the country does siesta. We just have lunch.

Obviously nothing is universal. But to an American visiting Spain the hours of operation there are striking! I only visited Madrid and Sevilla, but I found that restaurants and many stores were open much later than I was accustomed to (my hometown mostly shuts down around 8pm or 9pm, for example), and the fact that anything was closed around lunch was very odd! It definitely gave a fun "flavor" to my trip that was quite different from, say, Singapore.

[anthk]

That's because of Franco's timezone shift: we were shifted to GMT+1 because the fascist dictator loved Germany. Odd because the Greenwich meridian crosses half of Spain in Aragon.

[AshamedCaptain]

Not really. The difference between eastern Spain and southern France is already striking and they are on the same meridian and same timezone. Its not hard for me to see a shop that closes at 9pm in Spain, then move 50km north and find exactly the same brand shop closing at 6pm in France (E.g. fnac), practically with midday sun on summer.

Lately France is getting a bit more of the delay too, with shops opening at 10 and closing at 19.

[anthk]

>Lately France is getting a bit more of the delay too, with shops opening at 10 and closing at 19.

Technically we should be on GMT, not GMT+1. Then we aren't that far from France.