An American spending their first summer in Europe notices it within days and finds it slightly alarming. The windows are open. Everywhere, all the time, in the heat of summer, Europeans fling their windows wide and let the outside in, where an American would seal the house and crank the air conditioning. To the American, …
Like most people, I had a firm and comforting belief about coffee and sleep: an afternoon cup does not affect me, because I fall asleep just fine at night. It is one of the most common things people say about caffeine, almost always with real confidence, and it is exactly what let me happily drink …
The American on a Spanish beach for the first time experiences a small series of jolts. A woman of any age, topless, entirely unselfconscious, treating it as the most ordinary thing in the world. Families changing at the beach with a casual matter-of-factness. An ease about the body, undressed or partly so, that the American, …
An American couple is invited to dinner at the home of a Greek family they met two evenings earlier at a taverna north of Athens. The family has gone to real trouble: appetizers crowding a big central table, a lamb slow-roasted for hours, side dishes, homemade wine. It is a serious act of welcome. The …
Watch an Italian man of eighty-five move through his day in a village in the hills, and you see something that has largely vanished from American life, a man still fully woven into the daily fabric of his world, walking everywhere, tending his garden, sitting in the piazza with his lifelong friends, eating with his …
On any Spanish beach in summer you will see something that quietly astonishes Americans. A woman of seventy, in a swimsuit, walking to the water with the unhurried ease of someone who has never once wondered whether she is allowed to be there. No cover-up clutched around her, no towel held strategically, no visible calculation …
Watch an Italian grandmother cook pasta and you will notice a small ritual that most Americans skip entirely. Just before she drains the pot, she dips a cup or a ladle into the cloudy, starchy water and sets it aside, and only then does she pour the rest down the sink. That saved cup of …
Walk through a Spanish town in September and you will notice something in the air, a sweet, smoky, unmistakable smell drifting from windows and balconies and courtyards. It is the unmistakable smell of roasting peppers, and for a few weeks each autumn it seems to fill the whole country entirely, because this is the season …
A lot of people talk about brain health after 70 as if the whole answer lives in supplements, crossword puzzles, and whatever expensive powder is currently pretending to be neuroscience. The more useful answer is usually much duller. Eat breakfast. Eat it regularly. Do not turn the first meal of the day into either a …
The French cafe is one of the great pleasures of travel, and it is also a quiet minefield of unwritten rules that an American can trip over before the coffee even lands on the table. None of them are written on any menu, but all of them are enforced by the servers and the regulars …
Tell an American that you and your spouse are taking separate vacations this year, that you are off to hike with friends while your partner heads somewhere else entirely, and you may be met with a worried look and the unspoken question, is everything okay at home. In much of Europe, the same announcement raises …
Somewhere in Spain, in an ordinary hospital nursery, a striking statistic is playing out one baby at a time. Roughly one in nine babies born in the country now comes into the world with the help of fertility treatment, a share so high it makes Spain the assisted-reproduction capital of Europe. Behind that number are …