An American who takes a job in Spain runs into a puzzle on their very first payslip. The salary was quoted as a yearly figure “in fourteen payments,” which already sounds odd, and then, twice a year, something strange happens: the paycheck roughly doubles. Once in the summer and once at Christmas, a second helping …
The French eat more cheese than almost anyone on earth, along with plenty of butter, cream, and rich food, and yet they have long had lower rates of heart disease than you would expect from all that saturated fat. This puzzle even has a name, the French paradox, and it has fascinated researchers for decades. …
You sit down at a restaurant in Lisbon or Porto, and before you have so much as glanced at the menu, the waiter appears and sets down a little spread: a basket of good bread, a dish of olives, perhaps some butter, a wedge of cheese, maybe a small bowl of tuna pate. It looks …
One of the first things that disorients visitors to Spain is the clock. Dinner at ten at night. The sun still blazing at nine thirty in summer. Children playing in the square long after an American bedtime. Prime-time television that does not begin until after ten. It is tempting to chalk it all up to …
The brochure version of retiring in Spain is close to perfect: sunshine most of the year, long lunches, cheap wine, a slower pace, and a cost of living that makes an American pension stretch like magic. All of that is genuinely true, every sunny word of it, and it is why Spain has been the …
If you live in Europe but keep one foot in American life, you have run into this twice a year. For a stretch of days, the time difference you memorized simply stops being true. It is one of the small, genuinely disruptive things about a life split across two continents. And it is one almost …
If you could carry only one French word into France, it would not be merci, and it would not be the famously useful s’il vous plait. It would be bonjour. This single word, meaning simply good day, is the master key to the entire country, the difference between a France that is warm, helpful, and …
I borrowed the plain habits Germans use to make sleep a civic routine. Thirty days later the pill bottle gathered dust, evenings got quiet, and my appetite calmed down enough to move the scale. The plan worked because it was small, repeatable, and built into the clock rather than my mood. Before the Switch: Nights …
For most of the year you will not find them anywhere. Then, for a handful of days around the first of November, the bakery windows of Madrid fill with small, pale-golden little puffs, piled in glistening heaps and dusted with sugar, and Madrilenos line up to buy them by the dozen. They are bunuelos de …
Every few months the €1 house story circles the internet again, and every time, a certain kind of reader asks the obvious follow-up question. Italy sells crumbling houses for a euro, so where are Spain’s? The answer is that Spain has no such scheme, has never really had one, and does not appear to want …
Somewhere in the research every American does before dreaming seriously about Spain, they run into a number that stops them cold: Spain’s top income tax rate, depending on the region, runs from around 45 percent to a frankly terrifying 54 percent. And a reasonable person reads that and thinks, well, that is the end of …
Here is a fact that shapes the lives of a great many American retirees more than they expected: Medicare simply stops at the border. It pays nothing, with only the narrowest exceptions, the moment you leave the United States. And even at home, basic Medicare has never covered the things that empty retirees’ wallets fastest, …