Walk down the cereal aisle in an American supermarket and the colors are almost violent: electric reds, fluorescent yellows, blues that do not occur anywhere in nature. Walk down the same aisle in Europe and the equivalent products are noticeably softer and duller in color, tinted with beet juice or turmeric or paprika extract, or …
For a month, I did something that felt genuinely transgressive, something that made my hand hesitate over the receipt every single time. Living back in the States for a stretch after years in Spain, I decided to tip the way I had learned to tip in Europe, which is to say modestly, or by rounding …
There is a very specific moment that happens to American visitors at a German spa, and it happens right at the door of the sauna, usually about three seconds after they look through the glass. They have showered, they have their towel, they are ready to relax, and then they look through the glass and …
Somewhere in the night, in millions of American bedrooms, the same small war is being fought. One person rolls over and takes the blanket with them. The other wakes up cold, tugs it back, and sets off a slow-motion tug of war that neither of them is fully awake for. One of them is too …
An American renting an apartment in Europe for the first time often has two small domestic shocks in fairly quick succession. The first is finding the washing machine tucked under the kitchen counter, sitting there between the dishwasher and the fridge as though that were the most natural place in the entire world for it. …
There is a form that every single American with a foreign bank account is supposed to file once a year, that most of them have simply never heard of, and and that carries penalties frightening enough to make people go visibly pale the moment they finally learn about it. It is called the FBAR, and …
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 …
You have finished a wonderful dinner in Rome, the plates are long cleared, and now you are ready to pay and go. So you wait for the check. And you wait. The waiter drifts past, unhurried, attending to other tables, and the bill simply never appears, until you begin to feel invisible, wondering if you …
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 …
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 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, …
The rude move is not smiling too little or failing some secret phrase test. It is much simpler than that. In much of Europe, the checkout is treated as a fast shared zone, and a lot of Americans still treat it like a private packing station. A lot of Americans do this without even noticing. …