A 64-year-old woman in a small town outside Florence starts every morning the same way she has for the past 35 years. She fills a glass with warm water from the kettle. She squeezes half a lemon into it. She sips it slowly across about 8 minutes while she stands at her kitchen window. Then …
You are at dinner in Italy or Spain or France, the wine is flowing, and you have had exactly as much as you want. But the host, or the waiter, keeps coming, bottle in hand, ready to top you up the moment your glass dips below full, and saying no out loud, again and again, …
A year ago, I wrote about adopting what I came to call France’s two-meal rule: the very French habit of eating two proper, unhurried meals a day, a real sit-down lunch and a real dinner, and simply not grazing in between. It was inspired by watching how the French actually eat, structured meals at set …
For thirty days straight, I wore a small sensor on the back of my arm that measured my blood sugar every few minutes and beamed the numbers to my phone. It is called a continuous glucose monitor, and while it was invented to help people with diabetes manage a serious condition, a growing number of …
The Instagram stories of Americans fleeing to Europe never show the returns – 40% are back in America within two years, broke, defeated, and pretending their “European adventure” was always meant to be temporary. They arrived with dreams of café life and affordable healthcare, then discovered European salaries, apartment hunting, and the reality that “everyone …
When the first real heat of the Madrid summer arrived, I did what any sensible person raised on air conditioning would do. I reached for the switch. Then I looked around at my neighbors, in a building and a city that has endured these summers for centuries, and noticed that most of them were doing …
Arrive at a lake outside Berlin on a warm afternoon, or wander into a German sauna for the first time, and you may encounter something that stops an American in their tracks: people, whole families, entirely comfortable and entirely naked, sunbathing and swimming and relaxing as though it were the most ordinary thing in the …
You can stand on any restaurant terrace in Madrid at nine on a Friday night and play the game. Spot the Americans. It takes about four seconds, and it is never the accent, because nobody has spoken yet. It is the clothes. Spain is not a formal country, nobody is wearing a tie, and yet …
An American rents an apartment in Madrid or Rome or Berlin, throws open the window on the first warm evening, and stops short. There is nothing there. No screen, no mesh, no barrier of any kind between the room and the open air, just a window that swings wide onto the street. For a person …
Walk into almost any American restaurant that calls itself Italian and the menu will be full of it: chicken alfredo, chicken penne, grilled chicken over spaghetti, chicken tossed into every creamy sauce on the page. To an American, chicken and pasta go together as naturally as peanut butter and jelly, a default pairing nobody thinks …
In America, a prenuptial agreement is a fraught and famous thing, the document couples argue over, lawyers grow rich on, and romantics regard with suspicion, because it is the only way to spell out in advance what happens to a couple’s money if the marriage ends. Across most of Europe, prenups in that sense are …
In Spain today, if you line up ten newborns, the odds are that one of them was born to a mother in her forties. That single statistic, roughly one in ten Spanish babies born to a mother over 40, is the highest share anywhere in Europe, and it is not close. It is roughly double …