You sort your rubbish. Not just paper and plastic. Cardboard. PET from other plastics. Glass by colour. Organic waste, if your local council collects it. In summer, you wash containers before throwing them away so they don’t smell in the bin. The first time you returned to Spain for a visit and couldn’t find the right bin, you stood there for a moment wondering what to do with the glass bottle. Something that used to be second nature had suddenly disappeared.
You no longer make any noise after ten o’clock at night. Not just because you’re worried about the neighbours – although that does play a part – but because it now seems normal to you that people are asleep at that time. If there’s a party in the block and it goes on past midnight, you see it as a minor nuisance. Back in the day in Spain, that wasn’t even an issue. Now it is.
You arrive on time. Not ‘ten minutes late – it doesn’t start on the dot anyway’. Be on time, or let people know. When someone turns up late without saying a word, you feel a vague sense of unease that you couldn’t quite put your finger on until you’ve been here a while. It’s not anger. It’s more a feeling that something isn’t quite right.
Nobody’s taught you this. There’s no integration course that explains it. You’ve just picked it up over the years. And the moment you realise it is usually when you come back from holiday in Spain, or when a newcomer does something that already strikes you as odd. The first time you catch yourself explaining to someone why you can’t ring your neighbour’s doorbell at eleven o’clock at night, you know that something has changed forever.