I’ve now been abroad for three months, and many things have taken some time to adjust to. It is difficult to talk to family and friends because of the time difference. By the time they are off work, it is basically midnight for me, making communication more sparse and awkward. The most jarring point for me is when I wake up in the morning after sleeping, they are usually still awake and haven’t even gone to sleep yet. However, what I am going to talk about some more is the aspects of food and eating.

Now, the host family that I am staying with is Argentinian, so the types of food they cook are not as representative of Spain. However, we still stick to the cultural aspects of eating. For what types of food they make, it is heavy in meat and bread. In the United States, this isn’t uncommon, but they simply lay it out differently. Here, my host family will make lots of dishes with meat as the main aspect, without being transformed, just pure meat. Bread is also now a staple of my every meal and is laid out as a complementary or side dish to everything we eat. I really like it, as it is a great neutral finger food to have with anything. Both of these are different from how my family makes things back home, but I find it interesting to notice the small things I took as normal in the States.

The time for meals is very different here. There can be up to five meals in a day, but we only really have two: lunch and dinner. Breakfast here is not really a meal; it’s just something to get you going until later. However, I don’t eat breakfast, so it doesn’t matter to me anyway. Lunch is eaten around 2–4 p.m. and, for many, is the biggest meal of the day. This has been the hardest part for me to adapt to since eating this late is hard, especially since I do not eat breakfast. Finally, there’s dinner, which can be anywhere from 7:30–10 p.m. This also throws me off because I do not have much time after dinner to do anything before going to sleep, which threw off my internal clock a lot when I first arrived here.

I could go on for longer, but this is the main big stuff to talk about. Food and eating are so normal and routine that having them changed felt extremely weird. However, once you get in the rhythm, it does not even faze you anymore.

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: ALI Abroad: University of Alicante