To Feel at Home in a New Place, It Helps to Think Like a Snail - The New York Times

On the first morning without rain after I moved to Switzerland, I woke up, still jet-lagged, and walked outside to look at any part of my new home that wasn’t cluttered with half-unpacked boxes. I saw a snail. It was huge. Its light brown shell stood taller than the tip of my shoe. Its yellowish-green body stretched about an inch ahead and behind. Its eyestalks probed the air in small circles. I pointed it out to my mother-in-law, who lives two floors down and was working in the garden. “Careful,” she said. “They’re protected.” I knew moving from the United States, where I had lived my entire life, to the village outside Basel where my wife was born would bring some confusion. But protection for snails? We were two blocks from the border with France, where snails are served in garlicky butter sauce. On the Swiss side, snails seemed about as common as squirrels back home. They were under trees, on fence posts and stuck to the sides of houses. I even saw a few tiny shells in the mailbox,

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• Julia Wu