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, …
Americans are destroying their skin with twice-daily scalding showers, 47 products, and aggressive scrubbing while Europeans take 5-minute lukewarm rinses three times a week and have perfect skin. My French neighbor showers every third day, uses one bar of soap, and has skin like a 25-year-old at 58 while I was showering twice daily with …
Few images say Santorini like the donkey ride. The whitewashed town perched on the cliff, the blue domes, and the line of donkeys and mules carrying tourists up the steep, zigzagging steps from the old port far below. For generations it has been one of the island’s signature experiences, and for many cruise passengers it …
The Italian kitchen functions on a set of small habits that most Americans never learn. None of them are technically difficult. None of them require special equipment. They are simply embedded in Italian cooking culture in ways they are not embedded in American cooking culture, and the cumulative effect across thousands of meals is the …
Somewhere in a country restaurant in Andalusia right now, a pan of potatoes is cooking very slowly in a generous pool of olive oil, softening rather than crisping, mingling with green pepper and onion and garlic until the whole thing turns meltingly tender and fragrant. This is patatas a lo pobre, poor man’s potatoes, and …
The damage is usually done before the menus arrive. An American walks into an Italian restaurant, and within the first ten minutes, often the first ten seconds, has broken three or four unwritten rules without the faintest idea, while the staff exchange the small glance that means tourists, and the evening settles into the polite, …
Ask an American home cook what it takes to make a proper French beef stew, and you will hear a familiar liturgy of rules, most of them absorbed, directly or secondhand, from a certain famous French cookbook and the TV chef who wrote it. You must brown the meat in small batches so the pan …
The lie Americans are sold is that weight loss requires a personality transplant. You have to track everything. You have to go hungry. You have to learn a new identity vocabulary. You have to “be good” forever. You have to treat food like a moral test and your body like a problem you created. For …
There is a dish you can order in almost any bar in Spain, from the grandest in Madrid to the smallest in an Andalusian village, and it arrives the same way everywhere, a small earthenware dish still violently bubbling, shrimp curled in golden oil thick with sliced garlic and a confetti of red pepper, a …
A man moved to Lecce, the baroque jewel of Italy’s southern heel, alone at sixty-four with ninety-seven thousand dollars, a sum so small for a retirement that any American financial advisor would have told him it was impossible. Seven years later, at seventy-one, he is settled in one of the most beautiful cities in southern …
Americans who want to work in Spain tend to focus on all the wrong things. They polish their resumes, they network, they look for job openings, they worry about whether they have the right skills or experience, all of which would matter enormously if they were job-hunting in America. But in Spain, as an American, …
So let me say the quiet part first. French men are boringly consistent about one thing that Americans underrate. They get enough magnesium. Not in pills the size of dice and definitely not from “performance gummies.” They drink it, nibble it, and fold it into dinner. If you think virility is only hormones and bravado, …