One Country's Weekend Starts With Church Bells, The Other's Starts On Thursday Night

🇮🇹 Italy × 🇰🇼 Kuwait — By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Italy's weekend is a slow, sacred unwinding built around a table that seats at least twelve and a Sunday lunch that can outlast most marriages. Kuwait's weekend runs Friday to Saturday, arrives with the sudden relief of a pressure valve releasing, and gets spent largely indoors, air-conditioned, chalet-adjacent, and thoroughly social in a way that has nothing to do with the calendar the rest of the world uses.

I've sat through a five-hour Sunday lunch in Puglia where dessert arrived roughly around the time most countries start thinking about dinner, and I've been to a Kuwaiti gathering that started at 9 p.m. on a Thursday and showed no sign of slowing by 2 a.m., fuelled by karak tea and a communal disregard for anyone who needed to be up early. Both cultures have figured out that leisure is not the absence of structure — it's a structure of its own, just aimed at pleasure instead of productivity.

Photo: Huỳnh Đạt via Pexels

Do's & Don'ts: 🇮🇹 Italy

Do's & Don'ts: 🇰🇼 Kuwait

Italy: the Sunday that refuses to be rushed

Italian weekend culture is, more than almost anywhere else in Europe, organised around a single institutional event: Sunday lunch, or il pranzo della domenica, which functions less as a meal than as a mandatory family reunion with courses. It starts around one, sometimes later, and rolls through antipasti, a primo, a secondo, contorni, dessert, coffee, and usually a digestivo, with conversation looping back on itself for hours in a way that would feel, to an efficiency-minded outsider, almost hostile to the concept of a schedule. Nobody there minds. That's rather the point.

Saturday, by contrast, tends to be the more flexible day — errands, sport, a passeggiata through town in the early evening where entire families turn out simply to walk, see, and be seen, an activity that sounds thin on paper and is, in practice, one of the more socially rich things a culture can do with unstructured time. Aperitivo culture fills the gap between afternoon and dinner, a ritual where a modest drink buys access to a spread of snacks and, more importantly, an hour or two of unhurried conversation that no one treats as filler.

The one thing that catches every newcomer off guard is August. A meaningful share of the country simply closes — small businesses, family-run restaurants, entire coastal towns rearranging themselves around the collective assumption that everyone who matters is already at the beach. Planning to get anything bureaucratic done in a Sicilian town in mid-August is a fool's errand, and Italians will tell you so, cheerfully, while packing for Ferragosto.

Kuwait: the weekend that starts Thursday and runs on karak

Kuwait's weekend runs Friday and Saturday, following the wider Gulf convention rather than the Western Saturday-Sunday model, which means the real social action kicks off Thursday evening the moment the working week ends — a burst of energy after five days that often feel compressed by the summer heat into fewer productive daylight hours than the calendar suggests. Streets and malls that are subdued on a Tuesday come alive by Thursday night, and the pace holds through Friday evening into Saturday before tapering as the new week approaches.

The diwaniya remains the cultural anchor of Kuwaiti weekend life — a traditional gathering space, often a dedicated room or building attached to a family home, where men (and increasingly mixed or separate gatherings depending on the family) meet regularly to talk, eat, and socialise for hours on end. Chalets along the coast serve a similar function for families and larger groups, offering a private, air-conditioned escape from both the heat and the more public, formal spaces of daily life. Both institutions matter far more to actual Kuwaiti leisure than anything resembling a Western "night out."

Because alcohol is illegal nationwide, the entire architecture of nightlife looks different from what many expats expect on arrival — no bar culture, no pub crawl, none of the assumed connective tissue of a Western weekend. What fills the space instead is genuinely vibrant: elaborate café culture, enormous air-conditioned malls that function as evening destinations in their own right during summer's brutal daytime heat, and a private-gathering culture that, once you're actually invited into it, is considerably warmer and more social than the empty streets at 2 p.m. would ever suggest.

Photo: Haydn Dalton via Pexels

The Verdict

Italy wins on ritual density — nowhere else turns a single meal into an entire afternoon's worth of meaning, generation after generation, without anyone questioning why. Kuwait wins on adaptability, having built an entire rich weekend culture around climate and religious observance that would flatten a less resourceful society into simply staying indoors and waiting for winter.

Given the option, I'd take the Italian Sunday table over the Kuwaiti diwaniya purely for the food — sorry, but nothing in the world beats a proper ragù after four hours of buildup. But Kuwait deserves genuine credit for proving a fantastic weekend doesn't require alcohol, mild weather, or even daylight; it just requires good company and the collective decision to actually show up for it.

What Nobody Warned You About

Reddit r/expats — paraphrased: a new arrival in Kuwait describing the shock of realising "Friday" meant total silence until midday, having assumed the weekend would mirror a normal Saturday morning.

Internations Milan — paraphrased: an expat noting they'd underestimated just how completely a Sunday lunch invitation would consume the entire day, having budgeted "two hours, tops."

expat.com Kuwait forum — paraphrased: a long-term resident explaining that getting a genuine invitation to a diwaniya, rather than just knowing it exists, is where Kuwaiti social life actually opens up for foreigners.

Conclusion

Italy's weekend is inherited — a table, a ritual, a rhythm passed down so completely that resisting it would feel like resisting gravity. Kuwait's weekend is engineered — a deliberate, climate-adapted, faith-conscious structure that manufactures joy out of conditions that would defeat a less determined culture. Go to Italy for a Sunday that teaches you patience is its own reward. Go to Kuwait for a Thursday night that proves a good weekend was never really about what's legal to drink.