The French bistro has a reputation among Americans for hostility, the rude waiter, the cold welcome, the sense of being judged and found wanting. The reputation is mostly wrong, but it grows from something real, which is that the American walks into the bistro breaking a series of small rules without knowing it, and the …
There is a received wisdom about Mediterranean travel that says to avoid July, that the heat is too much and the crowds too thick, that the wise traveler comes in the gentler shoulder seasons of spring and fall. And for some places, the overrun famous spots, that wisdom holds. But there is another truth that …
At ten in the evening in a Madrid summer, the city is just sitting down to dinner. The plazas are filling, the terraces are full, children are still playing in the squares, and the whole social life of the city is unfolding in the warm night air, hours after an American city would have gone …
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, …
The Portuguese woman in line at the pharmacy in Cascais asks for a specific brand of intimate wash by name, the way an American might ask for a specific shampoo. The pharmacist hands it over without comment. Two products, one for daily use, one for stronger cleansing during menstruation or post-illness. The transaction takes ninety …
French grandmothers do not eat butter like a dare. They eat it like it’s food. A small knob on green beans. A thin smear on bread. A little in a pan for eggs. Butter shows up constantly, but it doesn’t show up as a lifestyle. It’s not a keto badge. It’s not a “treat day.” …
The American steps into the spa at a Portuguese hotel or a Lisbon wellness center expecting the familiar routine, the swimsuit, the modest American spa etiquette, the quiet separateness, and encounters instead a set of customs that gives them pause, the different relationship to the body, the rules about what to wear and not wear, …
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, …
At month sixteen in Spain, the suitcases were half mentally packed. Not literally, not yet, but in the way that matters, the couple had begun talking in the careful low voices people use when they are circling a decision neither wants to say first, the conversation that starts with maybe this isn’t working and ends, …
Americans have a sleep problem. Not a mysterious one. Not a genetic one. A structural one. Roughly 70 million Americans deal with chronic sleep issues. Over-the-counter sleep aids are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Melatonin gummies alone generate over $1 billion in annual U.S. sales. Prescription sleep medications like zolpidem (Ambien), eszopiclone (Lunesta), and trazodone are among …
The Portuguese café looks, to an American, like the most relaxed place on earth. Old men nursing tiny coffees for an hour, newspapers, the unhurried hum of a place with nowhere to be. So Americans walk in and behave the way they would at home, and a set of small invisible lines gets crossed, none …
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 …