Brussels is an international village. Dinner parties here sometimes feel like informal, mini-UN summits. This week, we were invited to dinner at a dear friend’s house who is half-Austrian and half-French. The dinner guests consisted of an Indian, a Portugese, an Italian, an El-Salvadorian, a Belgian, and two Americans (one from the East Coast and one from the West Coast). Dining out in Brussels, whether it’s at a restaurant or someone’s home, always guarantees learning something new about another country. The Indian confessed to us she had never pumped gas in her life — in her country, self-service at the pump is out of the question. The Belgian ranked the endless list of the numerous chocolate shops in Brussels for us, and admitted his weakness for chocolates with fingerprints in them (to show that they are made by hand and not by a machine). The El-Salvadorian shared the name of a safari park outside of Brussels where she takes her children to see giraffes and hippos. There was a unanimous decision that the best Thanksgiving turkeys in town come from the local supermarket rather than the ex-patriate butcher. And the crowd was divided on whether or not America might one day see a female president, and whether Cecilia Sarkozy should have really been called upon to help negotiate the release of the jailed medics in Libya last summer. This was not a work dinner. This was purely pleasure and, for that reason, stimulating to, then, go away from the dinner actually feeling inspired to read The Economist. But I’m not sure the story about wild monkeys killing the deputy mayor of Delhi (actually, they attacked him and he fell off a balcony to his death) would be in The Economist. Learning by osmosis in this international village is a thrilling way to explore the world.