When you learn there’s more than one definition of “punctual”
Without our rigid scheduling, we’d be late to work, late getting the kids from soccer practice, and late for our Starbucks coffee break. Abroad, you’ll find this time and scheduling junk is not an innate lifestyle.
For me, the lesson came only after the umpteenth time I’d waited an extra hour for a man named Luis outside of a seedy metro station in Mexico City. Evidently, our 9pm meeting time for him signified the time to shower, roll a cigarette, and grab some tacos on the way to the metro.
Once you accept that the numbers on the clock are basically arbitrary, you’ll stop getting pissed off at all the Luises of the world and start to arrive at their flexible version of “on time.”