You sort your waste. 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 suddenly no longer existed.
You don’t make any noise after ten o’clock at night anymore. Not just because you’re worried about the neighbours—though that does play a part—but because it now seems perfectly normal to you that people are asleep at that time. If there’s a party in the building that goes on past midnight, you see it as a bit of a 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 us know. When someone turns up late without saying a word, you get a vague feeling that you couldn’t quite put your finger on until you’ve been here a while. It’s not anger. It’s more a sense that something isn’t quite right.
No one has taught you this. There’s no integration course that explains it. You’ve picked it up over the years. And the moment you realise it is usually when you return from a holiday in Spain, or when a newcomer does something that 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.