There comes a moment – one that’s hard to pinpoint exactly – when you realise you’ve adopted Swiss customs without having consciously decided to do so. It wasn’t a process. It wasn’t an effort to fit in. It just happened.
One of the most recognisable examples: you go into a chemist’s, a bakery or a supermarket, and on leaving you say ‘merci, tschüss’. It comes completely naturally. In German or French, depending on where you live. And you say it even though you still speak Spanish at home. It’s one of those habits that your surroundings instil in you without asking for permission. Like saying “bitte” when someone thanks you, or queuing without anyone asking you to, or automatically lowering your voice on the train.
The interesting thing is that this isn’t limited to language alone. There’s a certain way of behaving in public spaces, of managing time and punctuality, and of dealing with conflicts (sparingly, in writing, without making a fuss) that many Spaniards who’ve been here for years have internalised without it feeling forced. It doesn’t mean you’ve stopped being who you were. It means you live with two ways of doing things and, depending on the context, you switch between them. Sometimes without even realising it.
And when you go to Spain in August and see that the queue at the supermarket isn’t exactly a queue, or that the plumber turns up an hour later than agreed and nobody seems particularly bothered, you find yourself feeling a bit out of place. That slight sense of strangeness isn’t a betrayal of your roots. It’s just what happens when you’ve been operating within a different system for years.