A 64-year-old woman in a small town outside Florence starts every morning the same way she has for the past 35 years. She fills a glass with warm water from the kettle. She squeezes half a lemon into it. She sips it slowly across about 8 minutes while she stands at her kitchen window. Then …
Picture two Americans making the same move to Spain, selling the same house for the same gain, ending up in the same apartment in Valencia. One of them pays essentially no tax on the sale of their US home. The other pays well into six figures. The only difference between them is the order in …
An American whose parent or friend dies in Spain, or who finds themselves attending a Spanish funeral, often experiences a quiet shock in the middle of their grief. The funeral is tomorrow. Or even today. The speed of it, when they are used to a very different rhythm, can feel almost dizzying, as though they …
An American woman spends her first winter week in Europe and keeps noticing the same thing on every woman around her. Not the coats, though those are lovely too. The scarves. Enormous, generous, beautifully draped scarves, wrapped and looped and tossed, and worn not as a small afterthought but as the most striking thing about …
Suggest to a typical American that they might rent, rather than own, a home in retirement, and you will usually get a horrified look, followed by the familiar catechism: renting is throwing money away, you have to build equity, you do not want to be paying a landlord at seventy. It is one of the …
An American arrives in a European city in August, excited, and finds half of it closed. The little restaurant they were looking forward to has a handwritten sign in the window: closed for holidays, back in September. The bakery is shuttered, the family-run shop is dark, and the streets feel strangely empty, as if everyone …
There is a small Greek island in the Aegean where men routinely live into their nineties and beyond, where heart disease and dementia are strikingly rare, and where a surprising number of people simply seem to forget to die. The island is Ikaria, and it is one of the world’s handful of Blue Zones, the …
On her very first day in France, in November 1948, a thirty-six-year-old American who did not yet know how to cook sat down to lunch in Rouen and ate a dish that changed the entire course of her life. The American was Julia Child, the restaurant was La Couronne, and the dish was sole meuniere, …
An American woman lands in Europe, and within a day she has noticed the hands. Not consciously, perhaps, but the impression registers: the women around her have lovely nails, and yet something about them is different from home. Short. Natural-shaped. Bare or in the quietest polish. And always, unfailingly, neat. What is missing is just …
An American reaches the checkout in a European supermarket, unloads the cart onto the belt, and waits for the familiar routine: the cashier will scan, a bagger will pack, and the whole thing will proceed at a civilized pace. Instead, the cashier starts scanning at speed, the groceries come tumbling down the far end of …
You are sick in Spain. Properly sick, the kind where dragging yourself to a clinic, sitting in a waiting room, and dragging yourself home again feels like more than you can manage. You mention this to a Spanish friend, who says, simply, why not just have the doctor come to you. And you stare at …
An American steps out early in a European city, before breakfast, to grab a coffee and a pastry. They are in their gym clothes, the workout leggings or athletic shorts, the technical top, perhaps straight from a jog or perhaps just because it is what feels comfortable first thing. And on the short walk to …