Time
One of the biggest challenges for me was the locals understanding of time. When I first moved to Peru I got frustrated a lot, because nothing started on time. At some point, I learned that I needed to chill out because if I was going to continue like a Finn I would just go crazy and probably make everyone else crazy as well. So, I learned that it’s normal for the classes to start 15 minutes late, or sometimes even 30 minutes. And that meant I could not plan my sessions with a tight schedule. And it’s not just the students, sometimes the experts are late too.
The cause of these delays is often the traffic, which is nonmoving at times and people tend to use this as an excuse for their tardiness, but sometimes they are late because of the “public transportation”.
Public transportation or the lack of it
Every morning I travelled to work in a combi. It’s like a small bus, but all of these combis are like small enterprises and there are no schedules for them. Every morning I went to the bus stop and waited, sometimes I waited 5 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes. So I understand that it’s difficult to plan your day when you don’t have a clue when the combis are coming or if they are coming at all.
Also, there are too many cars! More than 10 million people live in Lima and the problem is that it was not build for that many people. The middle class is growing, so more and more people have money to buy cars, which creates a challenge with the traffic. To travel even short distances can potentially take hours. I worked with some people who spent two hours in a combi to get to work and two hours to go back. So they spent four hours a day in a small combi that was probably way too full to even sit down.
The combis are cheap though, so that’s great. I only paid 1 Sol to go to work, which is equivalent to 25 cents, pretty much nothing. But as I mentioned earlier they are often too full and that makes them quite unsafe. I do hope that Lima will get proper public transportation at some point so that people can travel faster and more safely.
Back to the Time
The concept of time at work is one thing and time in a social situation is another. If a party starts at 6 pm, Finnish people try to be there at 6pm, British people arrive a bit later, maybe 6:30 pm, but Peruvians would arrive probably around 8-9 pm. And again, that’s absolutely normal for them. So it’s all about understanding the culture and accepting that people have a different understanding of time.
The funny thing is that now I am used to the more “relaxed” way of looking at it after living for almost two years in Peru, but now I am back in Europe so I need to get myself back to a more disciplined way of living. So when I am in Finland I need to arrive at the meetings a few minutes early and in the UK, I need to be there dead on.
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