The first summer I spent in Spain, I did everything wrong. I threw the windows open in the afternoon to let some air in, I kept busy through the middle of the day, I drank cold water by the liter and wondered why I still felt wrung out, and I treated the heat as something …
And what they reveal about trust, responsibility, and why alcohol isn’t treated like a forbidden fruit across the Atlantic In many parts of the United States, teenage drinking is seen as a crisis waiting to happen. There are school assemblies, warning posters, and horror stories about parties gone wrong. Alcohol is either completely banned or …
You arrive with the energy of a subway at rush hour. Paris blinks twice, shrugs, and hands you a dossier checklist that could stun a lawyer. By month eight your savings feel thin, your landlord wants a guarantor you’ve never heard of, your French is good for bread but not for bureaucracy, and the city …
You sit down for a drink, she is direct and warm, and when the bill comes you realize you were not auditioning for exclusivity, you were auditioning for a second date among several. In France, what Americans label “cheating” is more narrowly defined. Before a relationship is official and exclusive, people often see more than …
Most Americans who move abroad for the dream of a richer life arrive and then quietly fail at the one thing that actually matters, which is building a real social life. They get the house, the visa, the view, and then they discover that they are lonely, marooned in a beautiful place among people they …
Start with the picture in your head. A weekday lunch in Lyon at 1:12 p.m. A basket of bread lands, a small slab of butter appears without fanfare, a carafe of table wine sits next to a pitcher of water, and no one looks guilty. Plates are rich but small, the room is loud, and …
So my acid reflux disappeared and I’m mad about it. Not mad that it’s gone mad that the solution was so stupidly simple and French women have been doing it forever while I was over here popping Tums like candy and sleeping propped up on three pillows like some kind of Victorian invalid. Two hours. …
An American walks into an Italian bar on a blazing July afternoon, the kind of day when the air shimmers over the cobblestones, and orders an iced coffee. The barista’s response is a small hesitation, a flicker of something between confusion and pity, and then the American gets something, because Italian baristas are gracious, but …
Order a glass of red in a Madrid bar and the pour costs less than a coffee in some American cities. It will also, very often, be better than the bottle you paid thirty dollars for back home. Spain sits on more vineyard land than any country on earth, makes wine the French would charge …
An American spending a first night in a Spanish bedroom usually notices three things before sleep. The shutters seal the room into genuine darkness, the bed is dressed in a way that does not match what they are used to, and the air is cooler and fresher than the rest of the apartment. None of …
Watch a Spanish child eat across a day and one thing stands out to an American parent. There is far less of the constant grazing that fills an American childhood, the endless stream of packaged snacks between meals, the snack cup in the car, the granola bar at every transition. The Spanish child eats at …
There is a particular sight in a Portuguese town on a warm evening. Older couples, well past sixty, walking together without hurry, stopping to talk, sitting over a small coffee or a glass of wine as the light goes. They are not killing time. They are doing the thing that has held them together for …