Punctuality: Some cultures are wound tighter than others

IN Switzerland, the land of watches, trains really do run like clockwork.

"If I'm 30 seconds late, the train is gone," said Michelle Kranz, who commutes daily into Lucerne, where she works for the tourist board.

Step across the border, and you're in a different universe.

Italy has two rail schedules: the one printed in the brochure and another, flashing updates, on a board in the station. The first may be a fantasy; the second, reality.

Next to posted departures, "invariably you see the word '\o7ritardato'\f7 [delayed]," said Rick Steves, who writes guidebooks and runs a tour company called Europe Through the Back Door in Edmonds, Wash.

Your time or my time? When traveling, you're in \o7their\f7 time. And that can affect almost everything: catching trains and buses, shopping, getting a meal and making appointments.

Knowing a little about the culture can prevent much of the frustration.

"It's important to go with the flow," Steves said. "If you go to a restaurant in Spain at 7 p.m., that's bad news. The staff is eating then."

Try going after 9 p.m., as the Spaniards do. For the Swiss, the earlier the better, say 6 p.m.; after 10, a tourist hoping for a hot meal in Switzerland just might go hungry.

As for the French, I swear they are born with clocks in their stomachs. A vintner I once visited near Bordeaux halted in mid-sentence to break for \o7dejeuner\f7.

In France, "the lunch hour is sacred," Steves said, "and it's not a short lunch."

By contrast, in some Latin American and southern European nations, hours and minutes seem hardly to matter.

In Mexico, guests invited to a 6 p.m. social dinner think nothing of showing up two or three hours later, said Terri Morrison, who is updating a 1995 guide she co-wrote called, "Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands: How to Do Business in More Than Sixty Countries," for release next year.

In fact, it's wise to arrive at least an hour late for dinner in Mexico City, Morrison said, to avoid embarrassing an unprepared host.

For Greeks, time can be as malleable as Dali's famous melting watches. On Crete a few years ago, I gave up trying to divine when I should return my rental car in time to catch a ferry back to Athens.

My insistent inquiries, phrased in myriad ways, drew the same response from the rental clerk: "Whenever you like."

Earlier, describing Germans who flocked to her island's beaches, the clerk had tapped her watch-less wrist, satirizing the visitors' capitulation to Chronos, the Greek god of time.