The Lunch Time Experience

Each day, at 12pm sharp the canteen will be filled with hundreds of staffs and students from the training center. I mean 12pm sharp. You can come later, but definitely not earlier.

It’s like back to the university days really. You queue up, pick up the food tray, slowly follow the queue and then take the dishes you want to have for lunch, then pay at the counter at the end of the line. Normally, it would take anywhere between 15-25 minutes for the whole process if I arrived at 12pm sharp. But if I arrived 5 minutes earlier, I would have everything done in less than a minute. The whole canteen is empty even it’s 5 minutes to noon!

The good thing was that there were varieties of food. They even have vegetarians. The Chinese guys would usually take 2 big bowls of rice, or 2-3 man tous. I couldn’t take that much rice at one go, so I’ll usually have only have half a bowl. That’s more than enough when eaten with the dishes.

There was one real weird thing I noticed about the Chinese guys. They would usually finish their lunch by 12.30pm, at the latest! In just 30 minutes, they queue up (that’s already like 15-25 minutes) and finish eating. Wow.

At first I couldn’t really understand why because the lunch hours are from 12.00 to 1.30pm. So why eat so fast? Are they rushing to somewhere?

Oh yeah! Most of them would go right back to their cubes, turn off all the lights and guess what? They’ll have a short nap under the table for a whole 1 hour. The sooner you finish your lunch, the longer time you have for your afternoon nap. I realized that this is actually a working culture in China, or at least in this company.

So, I tried to adapt to the new company culture that I’ve discovered. From the second week onwards, I started to take short naps after lunch, in which I think it really helps to recharge the body.

I know it might sound funny. But yeah, it’s true.