Walk through almost any Spanish neighborhood on a Sunday morning and you will find, somewhere nearby, a small shop with a row of whole chickens turning slowly on spits behind the glass, golden and glistening, filling the whole street with the smell of roasting garlic and paprika. This is a polleria, a roast chicken shop, …
Walk past any pastry shop in Spain in the last days of October, and the window will be full of what look, at a glance, like a tidy pile of small white bones. They are pale, cylindrical, ridged like a section of marrow bone, and dusted or glazed to a soft ivory, and Spaniards are …
There is a particular kind of Italian genius that has nothing to do with truffles or aged cheese or anything expensive, and pasta e fagioli is its purest expression. The name just means pasta and beans, and that is almost the entire ingredient list: a handful of dried beans, a little short pasta, a soffritto …
An American arrives at a beach on the Spanish coast, ready for a swim, and goes looking for somewhere to change. There is no changing room. There is no cabin, no stall, no building of any kind. Just sand, sea, and hundreds of people who have somehow all managed to get into their swimwear without …
On the evening of the fifth of December, something small and lovely happens in homes across Germany, Austria, and much of Central Europe. Children clean a boot until it shines, and set it carefully by the front door before they go to bed. In the morning they rush to check it, and the boot is …
For Americans, the end of October means one thing: Halloween. Costumes and candy, carved pumpkins and spooky decorations, children going door to door on the night of the thirty-first. It is loud, playful, secular, and enormously popular. Cross the Atlantic, though, and the picture changes almost completely. In much of Europe, the thirty-first of October …
Two facts about retirement sit oddly next to each other. In much of Europe, people leave work earlier than Americans do. In much of Europe, people also live longer than Americans do. Put those together and you get a result that ought to be impossible under the usual logic, in which retiring later is the …
Nobody really warns you about the first Christmas. When you move abroad, you brace yourself for the big, obvious challenges: the language, the paperwork, finding a doctor, making friends. What catches people off guard is something quieter and sharper, and it arrives in December. The holidays are when the pull of home is strongest, and …
Tourists land in Germany and order like they’re auditioning for Oktoberfest. Schnitzel. Sausage. A giant pork knuckle the size of a bowling ball. Something with a flag stuck in it. And yes, Germans eat those things. Somewhere. Sometimes. But a lot of the “classic German dishes” tourists chase are the kind of food many Germans …
In much of Northern Europe, winter does something that unsettles a lot of newcomers. The sun gives up early. By four or five in the afternoon it is gone, and in the far north it barely bothers to rise at all, leaving weeks of deep blue twilight where a proper day should be. To an …
An American man walks up to a public swimming pool in France, ready for a swim, wearing the same knee-length board shorts he wears at every pool back home. The attendant stops him at the entrance and refuses to let him in. The problem is not the man, or his behaviour, or his ticket. It …
For decades, olive oil has been celebrated as a friend to the heart, the golden centerpiece of the Mediterranean diet, praised in study after study for its effect on cholesterol and cardiovascular risk. So when a team of Harvard scientists followed more than ninety thousand Americans for twenty-eight years and looked at what olive oil …