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In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

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Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#141

Post by ashwinm »

nocoder wrote: post #137

This is pretty interesting. I am from India & you can observe something similar in India with a lot of people not all. We are not the most anal about being on time & most meetings never start on time. Parties or group dinners will never ever start on time. There is this thing called "Indian Stretchable Time", a funny variation on IST. I always wonder how much of this has to do with our cultural concept of time. As pe…

Adding to Indian mythological perspective, It views life in infinite terms. You are living in only one of the infinite number of life so why do you have to be in hurry?. Against western view of life as only one.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#142

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

chrischen wrote: post #84
cm2187 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing and in line with what my grand mother who grew up in the early 1900s Indochina told me about her (french) dad doing business there. The Chinese had the reputation to be super reliable and men of their word, while the Japanese had the reputation to be unreliable and ready to cross you at the first opportunity. On a longer time scale, it is hard when you look at Italy or Greece today to think of how the sa…

The unreliableness of Chinese-made goods is usually due to incompetent Western firms cost-cutting and communication errors arising from cross-globe, cross-language collaborations. It's unfortunate nobody blames the CEOs for made-in-China, just the Chinese people for making it.

I'm not sure that swapping one incorrect sweeping generalisation for another is really the answer.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#143

Post by orwin »

saagarjha wrote: post #38
pseudonym2 wrote: post #36

I'm from a Mediterranean country and it's customary to be 30 min to an hour late to parties. Distant acquintances and people that don't really feel like going will arrive close to 2 hours late. I thought this was the norm in the Western world. Is it not? Do folks in the English-speaking world arrive on the minute?

Not to the minute, but yes, most people usually show up within a fifteen minutes in either direction.

Don't do this in France. It's considered "polite" to arrive ~30minute late if you're invited, however, if you arrive early, you will be asked to help while the host/hostess take his/her last minute shower. I don't mind and i like being early, because the most meaningfull discussion are made there, but non-Latin foreigners can have some troubles to adjust.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#144

Post by brbrbrbrbr »

mFixman wrote: post #97
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

I don't think this is just a Brazilian thing. When I throw parties in the US nobody shows up until 30 mins after the start time, and the peak of people showing up is between 60 and 90 minutes after start time. The exception to this is dinner parties, where people are much more punctual because they know you're planning the meal timeline.

Cultural norms are different for different kind of events. In the US and most of the West, it's expected to be okay to be around one hour late for big house parties. However, Americans wouldn't normally be late for job interviews or other important events in a set time, which is completely normal in Latin America.

Not really, no one would be one hour late for a job interview in Brazil. There is rush hour in Brazil just like any other big city because people need to be on time for work, dropping kids on school, etc.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#145

Post by [deleted] »

nasredin wrote: post #34
foobarian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some etiquette involved. You don't want to be the first person there, just as you should avoid being the 'lingerer' who stays too long or even worse needs to be asked to leave explicitly.

Why don't you want to be the first person? I've heard of "fashionably late", never anything about "early". IME early bird gets all the good nachos. And you can leave earlier.

[deleted]

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#146

Post by brbrbrbrbr »

TheCoreh wrote: post #58
gota wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not accusng you of lying but this story is extremely suspicious. It conflicts completely with my professional and personal experience, which I'm pretty sure is close to the general truth. Unless you have found yourself working with a very peculiar group of people, you are being duped or just exaggerating to the point of being outright wrong. It is absolutely not a custom anywhere in Brazil, not even in Rio, to be…

It really depends on the industry, I guess. My observation, being born and having lived in Brazil for my whole life, is that there's a power/authority/seniority dynamic involved, too: If you have a meeting with a customer, you should be on time, but it's okay for them to be late. When meeting with your boss, they'll probably be late, but you probably shouldn't be. Internal meetings within the company usually start la…

so true.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#147

Post by axilmar »

While everyone here says it's a cultural difference between Brazilians and, for example, Germans, please let me express a different viewpoint.

To me it seems the reason Brazilians (and others, for example, Greeks, Indians, Italians etc) are not very punctual is the weather conditions.

The weather conditions, which are more relaxed in these countries, have allowed people to form a culture where they can be more relaxed in their social life.

On the other hand, in places where weather conditions are more difficult to tackle, for example colder, being punctual, being direct etc saves all the involved parties a lot of effort in communication and co-operation.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#148

Post by simias »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #26
acchow wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's 20 people going to a party, does anyone think the "start time" is really when you're supposed to be there? I think of it more as "don't come before this time".

Depends on the culture. Historically if you told a German 5:00, that meant 5:00 - nor 4:59, not 5:01. "Fashionably late" is an American thing.

In France it works the same as in the US or Brazil then in my experience, if the party is said to start at, say, 7pm it means that you can start showing up by that time but definitely not that you have to be here at 7 sharp. If it's a dinner I'd expect most people to arrive within the hour or so, if it's just some kind of party then I wouldn't be surprised to see people arriving a few hours "late". I would be quite surprised and probably not fully ready if I told a bunch of people to come to my party at 7 and they all showed up exactly on time.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#149

Post by zhdc1 »

ginko wrote: post #119
zhdc1 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education. The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling that was accessible by a large majority of it's population. They beat the Brits by about a decade.

>The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling Are you sure about that? Compulsory education was introduced in Austria in 1774. Apparently Japan introduced it shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. If anything the UK was particularly late to the game.

> that was accessible by a large majority of its population

Austria had major attendance and implementation issues (e.g., only a 50-60% attendance rate) which apparently weren't fixed until the Reich Public School Law of 1869.

That said, I remember that there was a lot of discussion at one point about how individual behavior in countries that overlapped ex-Austrian/Habsburg territory could be mapped against historical (19th century) boundaries.

Getting back to the original point, Japan was successful because it had high levels of urbanization, which made state directed education more accessible and easier to attain. Other countries/territories implemented compulsory education well before Japan (e.g., Massachusetts first required compulsory education in the 1640s), but efforts either had comparatively lower penetration or relied on non-state institutions (e.g., the church or private institutions) to enforce.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#150

Post by paganel »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #66
johnchristopher wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what ? What makes you think (and other commentators) that it's the Japaneses who changed and not the view held by post-colonialists ? (Managers complaining about their workers ? How weird)

It wasn't just the Japanese. "Korean time" was a thing back when Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized. There is correlation between stereotypes and GDP.

> overly emotional before their country industrialized.

After all some of the most famous Romantic artists came from Germany: Heine, Beethoven, Hölderlin and Goethe himself. The latter's Werther was the most emotional novel until at least Madam de Bovary, which was written about 80 years later.

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