I would venture to say that every Spanish person has had a similar experience when visiting some northern European countries for the first time.
I vividly remember mine, flushing red with embarrassment at the sight of families having dinner.
Some years after, I moved to Norway and Iceland and I started taking pride in keeping all my blinds open all the time, just like them.
Cue in, the blinds. Depending on your country of origin, you'll picture a different device when you hear this word.
If you're from Spain and other southern European countries like Portugal, Italy, and France, you're thinking of this. And I'm particularly obsessed with my neighbours'.
The broken ones, these ones that have never been used... But if you are born in the rest of Europe, chances are you're not thinking of the same thing, maybe you haven't even used one of them before.
And then I think one day we were like, 'What's this little thing on the wall here?'
It's like... It's like a belt and then you, like, pull it and all of a sudden it came down but it made such a noise it was like , it was crazy.
It was at least two years before we realised definitely.
But why, what is so special about these blinds? And why do we use them so much? Madrid, the capital of Spain, has an average of 2,700 sun hours per year, and even more further south.
