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 …
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 …
Somewhere along the way, Americans decided breakfast should be a daily menu, a fresh choice made every groggy morning between eggs and cereal and pastry and yogurt and whatever the drive-thru is selling. Much of Europe never got that memo. Across the continent, a great many people eat more or less the same breakfast every …
A retired engineer from suburban Cleveland arrives in Aix-en-Provence with his wife in September 2022. He is 67. She is 64. They have planned this move for four years. They sold their Ohio house, shipped a container of furniture, secured their French long-stay visas, and committed to the Provençal retirement that French wine country has …
Watch an American at a European beach shower and you can often spot them in seconds, because they treat the little post by the sand like the shower at home. Out comes the soap, or the shampoo, and a full scrub-down begins while a queue forms and the locals exchange a look. The outdoor beach …
An American arriving in Germany for the first time on a Sunday is often in for a jolt, because the shops are shut. Not some of them, not for a few hours, but nearly all of them, all day, by law. The supermarkets are dark, the clothing stores are locked, the whole apparatus of retail …
The German beer garden is one of the great social inventions of Europe, a shady grove of long wooden tables where strangers become table-mates over a liter of cold beer, and it runs on a set of unwritten rules that an American can break within minutes of arriving. Sit in the wrong section, bring the …
Sit on a Spanish terrace on a blazing summer afternoon and you will see people drinking beer with their lunch, glass after glass across the long, unhurried meal, and you will notice something surprising, which is that nobody around you is getting drunk. The secret is in the glass. Very often what looks like a …
In many Italian families, dessert is not a nightly event but a Sunday one. The tray of little pastries, the pastarelle as they call them in Rome, is bought on Sunday morning and brought to the long family lunch, shared at the end of the meal with coffee and relatives, and it is precisely because …
Americans tend to think of grilling as something close to a national invention, the backyard barbecue being as much a part of a Labor Day weekend as the flag itself. But the truth is that people have been cooking meat over fire everywhere fire and meat exist, and Europe grills with just as much passion …
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. …
Sitting down in a real Spanish restaurant, the kind with tablecloths and a proper kitchen rather than a bar lined with small plates, is one of the great pleasures of the country, and it runs on a rhythm that catches Americans out almost immediately. Show up at the wrong hour, order the wrong way, expect …