It has taken me a few weeks to adjust to the Argentine schedule.

Businesses are open from 8am-1pm, and then close for FOUR hours, while everyone goes home, has lunch and a nap. They reopen at 5pm, work until 9pm.

I´ve been trying to picture this schedule if I were working in lab. I think afternoon meetings would be a whole lot more productive if people got naps beforehand , but it would wreck havoc with time points and experiments. There would be a lot of “how low a voltage can I get this gel to run?!”, or ¨how long can I really serum starve these cells?¨

On the other hand, this schedule means that people also eat dinner much later than I am used to. Jonathan and I were soooo proud of ourselves for sitting down at dinner at 11:30 pm at a bar, only to find that entire families , including grandma, parents, toddlers and pregnant women just were coming in as we were leaving. The babies were simply set into the strollers, the little kids ran around, just like at an Applebees. But it was 1 am, in the morning. Check out Jonathan´s take on this here.

I am still finding this hard to swallow (literally), as I am usually so full that it´s hard to have time to digest before going to sleep.