There is a kind of knowledge you can only get by sitting at someone else’s table.

I had traveled before I became an au pair. I had done the museums, the walking tours, the carefully planned itineraries. I had eaten at the restaurants with the good reviews and taken photos of the things you are supposed to photograph. And I had loved it. But I had also stayed on the surface of every place I visited, moving through it like a guest who didn’t want to overstay.

Living with a host family in Rome changed that completely.

My host mother was an archaeologist. I didn’t fully understand what that meant for a home until I walked into hers. One wall was lined with masks, collected from different countries, different cultures, different points in her life — not decorations exactly, more like evidence of a person who had moved through the world with her eyes wide open and brought pieces of it back. Her children had a scrapbook filled with currencies from places I had never been to, coins and notes from countries I couldn’t have found on a map without help. That house felt like it had been lived in, layer by layer, year by year, and somehow I got to be a small part of it.

But the moment I keep coming back to is smaller than all of that.

One evening, my host mother took bell peppers and placed them directly on the gas stovetop. No pan, no oil, nothing between the flame and the pepper. She let them blister and blacken until the skin was almost entirely burnt. Then she peeled it all away with her hands, no rush, and covered the soft, sweet flesh in garlic and olive oil. She covered the dish and left it in the fridge overnight. We ate them the next day, and yes, they were incredible.

I had never seen anyone cook like that. Not because it was complicated, it wasn’t, but because it required a kind of patience and confidence I hadn’t thought to apply to something as ordinary as dinner. She knew that the burning was part of it. That you had to let something go through the fire before it became what it was supposed to be. I’ve thought about that dish more times than I can count.

There are things you learn about a culture in museums and guidebooks. And then there are things you only learn when someone lets you into their kitchen. When you watch how a family moves through a morning, how they argue and make up, how they rest on a Sunday, what they consider worth saving in a scrapbook. You can’t get that from a week’s vacation, no matter how well you plan it. You have to live somewhere, even briefly, to understand it from the inside.

That’s what living abroad gave me that travel alone never had. Not just the sights, but the real stuff. Not just the country, but the people who actually lived there and what they knew about it.

I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to step into that life without the support I had going in. RomeAbroad helped lay the groundwork, and that meant I could focus on actually being there, really being there, instead of stressing about the logistics.

If you’re someone who loves to travel and wants to go deeper, this is how you do it. You stop passing through and start showing up. You let yourself be a small, temporary part of someone else’s world. And you pay attention to what they know that you don’t.

The peppers will teach you something. I promise.