Somewhere in Spain right now, a small truck is working its way through a neighborhood, a delivery man is carrying a bright orange metal cylinder up a flight of stairs, and a household is trading an empty bottle for a full one so they can shower in hot water tomorrow. To a newcomer from a …
Ask almost anyone how to keep their mind sharp into old age, and sooner or later someone will mention the crossword. Along with sudoku and word searches, the daily puzzle has become the single most popular symbol of brain health, the mental equivalent of a brisk morning jog, the reassuring thing that dutiful people do …
The useful thing is not that French women age perfectly. They do not. The useful thing is that many of the habits Americans treat as optional after 50 are still treated in France as ordinary maintenance. A French woman over 60 does not need to announce that she is “prioritizing wellness.” She walks to the …
Order a bikini in a bar in Barcelona and no one will bat an eye. You will get a hot pressed sandwich of ham and cheese, crisp and golden on the outside, molten within, one of the most ordinary and beloved snacks in the whole city. Order the same thing by that name anywhere else …
There is a dish in Madrid that looks, at first glance, like something went slightly wrong in the kitchen. A pile of fried potatoes, a couple of fried eggs slumped on top with their yolks split and running everywhere, maybe some salty cured ham thrown carelessly over the lot. It is not neat, it is …
Picture a woman who, at sixty-seven and on her own, did something a lot of people only daydream about. She left the United States and moved by herself to Seville, in the south of Spain, to spend her retirement in a city she barely knew, without a partner to share the adventure or split the …
For many Americans, the thought of walking into a restaurant alone and asking for a table for one produces a small flicker of dread. It feels exposed, somehow, as though everyone will notice and wonder what is wrong, whether you have been stood up or have no friends, and so a great many people who …
An American walking into a European pharmacy or supermarket for the first time often has the same small shock at the personal-care shelves. The deodorant section, which back home sprawls across an entire aisle of sticks and gels and clinical-strength formulas, is here a modest handful of roll-ons and sprays taking up a fraction of …
Anyone who has held a bank account on both sides of the Atlantic soon discovers a strange truth: Spanish and American banks both charge fees, plenty of them, but they charge for entirely different things. The American who moves to Spain is startled to be billed simply for keeping an account open, while the Spaniard …
Spend a summer in Spain and you notice something quietly wonderful about the older women around you. In the fierce heat of August, when the temperature climbs and the streets shimmer, Spanish women in their sixties, seventies and beyond move through the day looking cool, put together, and effortlessly elegant, dressed in a handful of …
When an older person starts becoming forgetful, confused and unlike themselves, the fear that leaps to everyone’s mind is dementia, that slow, irreversible thief of memory and self. It is a reasonable fear, and often a correct one. But there is a quieter possibility that a good doctor will check for early, one that can …
It started with a simple question I could not answer. Standing in front of the milk in a supermarket, I realized I had no idea whether the cows that produced it had been given a synthetic growth hormone, because nothing on the carton told me. In Europe, where I live, this is not a question …