The first time many Americans are served a proper plate of food in Spain or Italy, a small disappointment flickers across their face. The plate looks underfilled. A modest piece of fish, a generous pile of greens dressed in oil, some good bread, and a lot of plain white china showing through. To an eye …
There is a test so simple it seems almost too crude to matter, and yet it has become one of the most talked-about measures in the science of aging. You grip a device as hard as you can, it registers the force in your hand, and that single number turns out to be remarkably informative …
You find the listing that seems perfect. A bright, well-located apartment in a very good neighborhood, at a fair and reasonable price, and best of all it is described as amueblado, furnished, which means you can simply move in with your suitcases and start your Spanish life without the expense and hassle of buying, moving …
An American moves to Europe, loads the European washing machine for the very first time, presses start, and watches in growing alarm as the display announces that the wash will take two hours and forty minutes. Back home in the States, a full load of laundry was reliably done in thirty or forty minutes. Something, …
Spain is running one of the most closely watched experiments in European housing policy, and it is running it twice, in two directions at once. In Catalonia, the regional government has embraced rent control, capping what landlords can charge across most of the region in a bid to tame runaway prices. In Madrid, the regional …
Somewhere in America right now, a set of grandparents is watching their adult children struggle under a bill that would have been unimaginable in their own young-parent years. It is not the mortgage or the car. It is daycare, the cost of having someone look after a small child while both parents work, and in …
In Finland, the sauna is a fixture of ordinary life, something many people do several times a week from childhood onward. So when Finnish researchers set out to follow thousands of middle-aged men for two decades, they were able to ask a question few other countries could: does the frequency of sauna bathing have any …
You arrive in Spain, you settle into a home or a hotel with a double bed, and you notice something strange about the pillows. Or rather, about the pillow, singular, because instead of the two separate pillows you expected, one for each person, there is a single enormous one stretching the entire width of the …
Somewhere in the early weeks of living in Spain, an American hits a wall of paperwork so bewildering that it stops them cold. A form that must be filed at one office, stamped at another, paid for with a specific code at a bank, and returned within a window nobody quite explains. It is at …
Every January, millions of Americans make the same promises to themselves. This is the year they will finally get in shape, get organized, get their lives together, and for a week or two the gyms are packed before, quietly, almost all of the resolutions dissolve back into the very routines they were meant to replace. …
The dream is seductive and specific. A sunlit apartment in Valencia, a whitewashed townhouse in Andalusia, a place near the sea with a price tag that, to anyone used to American or northern European property, looks almost impossibly good. And then, somewhere between the initial offer and the handover of the keys, the real number …
Picture a couple in their early sixties, both from the Seattle area, looking at the arithmetic of their retirement and not quite liking the answer. They love the Pacific Northwest, the green hills and the grey skies and the sea air, but the cost of staying has climbed out of proportion to what they get …