As I settle back into life in the United States after eight years abroad, I find myself struggling to reprogram my mind to the new Sunday landscape: all stores open, all day.
You see, I've spent the past eight years learning to live the European Sunday, where the only things that are universally open are churches and the "Sunday date" trio of cafés, restaurants and movie theaters. That said, the Euro-Sunday formula varies somewhat by country.
In Spain, newsstands do big business on Sundays. It's so busy at these kiosks that you usually have to queue up, which gives you time to fall prey to the eye-catching glossies cleverly stacked around you on the sidewalk. The typical newsstand purchase weighs several pounds and represents a quantifiable chunk of world deforestation, facts which you will come to appreciate more as you wait in line again, this time for a coveted outdoor seat at a café. Spain's tribute to Sunday capitalism: A few times a year (like at Christmas) all Corte Inglés department stores open all day on Sunday, playing to a full (and presumably well-read) house.
The surprisingly early-bird Spaniards make quite a contrast with the Dutch. My memories of Sundays in Amsterdam are tumbleweedy in the best ghost-town tradition. A Sunday morning walk to buy a paper and a croissant was remarkably and fascinatingly lonely; there were no lines at the newsstands, and most cafés still weren't open. Usually I was the only human out at 9 a.m. that wasn't selling newspapers or croissants. Things picked up later though; by the apparently more respectable hour of noon or 1 p.m., a familiar concept would emerge: folks largely reading and lounging in cafés—though definitely less boisterously than in Spain. Where the Spanish squawk in a café like seagulls (hey, they get excited about their coffee), the Dutch experience is more like going to the Museum of Coffee, Quiet Please.
In Switzerland, not only is Sunday off-limits for stores—even on Saturdays, stores close early (4 p.m.). This may not seem so dramatic to the Swiss, since stores close at 6 p.m. every other day (except for Thursday, when the whale oil is burned until 9 p.m.). In such a hostile environment for commerce, the best Sunday option was to hit one of Switzerland's big sit-down café/bakery establishments—packed with Swiss, but also with tables and chairs, so the wait would never be too long. Maybe this Swiss penchant for accommodating customers was the driving force behind the Great Swiss Sunday Exception: a small supermarket in the train station would be open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. (Swiss train stations are hubs of activity with lots of stores; kind of like a mini-airport). But only that supermarket was allowed to open. All others must close by law, and this was nowhere more apparent than in a Sunday visit to a Swiss gas station convenience shop: They literally cordoned off access to the aisles in their mini-mart for the duration of Sunday, leaving all the forbidden wares in plain view. If you asked if you could just grab something quickly from the cordoned-off area, they dependably refused. (I tried this once and ultimately just had to go without milk until Monday).
So imagine my surprise here in America. Not only can I do comparison grocery shopping on Sunday, but I also can roam the aisles of the Home Depot until 10 p.m. and get my coffee all day and all night at its built-in Dunkin' Donuts (now that is America). And I can even get my haircut at Supercuts, as their blazing neon OPEN sign plainly advertised to my doubting Europeanized eyes.
No one's commented yet about my new haircut. If they do, I'll tell them I got it at Supercuts.
If they ask when I got it, I'll tell them they'd never believe it.
Or maybe they would.
Photo: Not forgotten via Flickr (CC license)
