• After traveling to over 50 cities in Europe, I've enjoyed visiting some lesser-known locations.
• Bath, England, is a great place to visit for Roman ruins and beautiful architecture.
• I also loved traveling to Bruges, Belgium, which is both historic and romantic.

I've visited over 50 cities in Europe, and although I love global tourist hubs like London and Paris, I also try to seek out smaller cities and towns.

Here are five lesser-known destinations in Europe I recommend visiting.

Bath, England, is just a 90-minute train ride from London.

As you probably could have guessed from this city's name, Bath is known for its Roman baths. These baths, dating back to AD 70, are some of the best-preserved Roman ruins in the world.

The city is full of beautiful Georgian architecture, which can be admired in places like the Royal Crescent — a crescent-shaped row of 30 houses.

I also loved visiting the Circus, which is made up of townhouses arranged in a circular pattern. In my opinion, these areas are part of what makes walking around Bath feel unique.

The train from London to Bath takes about 90 minutes, making this city the perfect day trip.

Heidelberg, Germany, embraces modern life without losing its historical charm.

Heidelberg has striking views around every corner. The city is home to a centuries-old castle as well as the oldest university in Germany.

I enjoyed walking along Philosophenweg (also called Philosopher's Way), where professors sought solitude and academic inspiration. The path was especially beautiful during my trip in the fall.

We loved spending time in the city, which had lots of nice restaurants and cool bars. In my opinion, Heidelberg does an amazing job of embracing the new while holding on to its historical charm.

Bruges, Belgium, is a romantic city.

Bruges is a laid-back destination that makes a convenient day trip from nearby Paris and Brussels. In my opinion, visiting the medieval city feels like stepping back in time.

The best thing I did was take a boat ride on the canal, admiring the architecture while cruising through Minnewaterpark, commonly referred to as the Lake of Love.

The city is perfect for couples looking to indulge in Belgian beer and chocolate.

Mostar is a beautiful city in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Mostar really surprised me because it didn't look like anywhere else I'd been. The towering 16th-century Old Bridge connecting the two sides of the city is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The city also has a well-preserved Ottoman quarter with charming cobblestone streets.

During my time in Mostar, I loved drinking Bosnian coffee, taking in the views of the city, and feasting on local dishes like ćevapi.

Andorra La Vella is a hidden gem in the Pyrenees mountains.

Andorra La Vella is the capital of Andorra, a country in the Pyrenees between France and Spain.

Every restaurant we dined at featured dishes influenced by the surrounding countries. If you want to try authentic Andorran food, head to a borda — a traditional house once used for agricultural purposes. Now, these buildings are used as charming restaurants.

Andorra la Vella makes a great day trip from Barcelona, but, in my opinion, the city deserves more than a one-day visit.

This story was originally published on July 3, 2024, and most recently updated on October 22, 2025.

• I often love Ina Garten's easy, flavorful recipes, so I gave her buttermilk mashed potatoes a try.
• The buttermilk made this dish more flavorful than other mashed-potato recipes I've followed.
• From now on, I plan on making this recipe every time I host or attend a dinner party.

I firmly believe that no fall or winter dinner party is complete without a big bowl of piping-hot mashed potatoes.

That said, there's nothing worse than digging into a pile of fluffy potatoes, only to discover that they're bland or dry.

Although there are dozens of ways to dress up spuds with mix-ins like cheese, sour cream, and extra butter, kitchen queen Ina Garten has a wonderfully simple recipe that I had to try.

I'm so glad I did. Not only is Garten's recipe short and sweet, but the dish is flavor-packed, ultra-creamy, and about to be a part of every future holiday spread in my house.

Here's how to make Garten's mashed potatoes.

The ingredient list is short and simple.

You only need six ingredients for this simple side dish: kosher salt, potatoes, whole milk, unsalted butter, buttermilk, and black pepper.

Garten recommends using a potato that's easy to boil, such as Yukon Gold. Russets would work well, too: Compared to other potatoes, these varieties contain more starch, which breaks down when mashed into a light and fluffy texture.

Yukons are my personal preference; I've found them to be slightly creamier than other options.

The potatoes took me under 10 minutes to prep.

Once I collected my ingredients — and set a big pot of well-salted water to boil on the stove — I started on the prep work.

The first step here is peeling the potatoes, but don't worry about doing it perfectly.

I've found that, as long as the spuds are clean, a few pieces of potato skin in the mix won't really change the dish's quality. Some home chefs might even like to leave a bit of skin on for extra texture.

The potatoes should then be cut into roughly equal-sized pieces so they cook at the same rate.

Garten recommends 1 ½-inch cubes, but it's OK if you're not super precise, since everything will be mashed together later.

Cook the potatoes, and don't let them get gummy.

Once the water came to a boil on the stove, I added the prepped potatoes and reduced the heat to maintain a gentle simmer with the lid off.

An important part of the recipe is to avoid boiling the potatoes, which can make them turn gummy. Instead, keep the water at a nice simmer until you can easily pierce the spuds with a paring knife. This took me between 10 and 15 minutes.

When they're done, drain the potatoes in the sink and return them to the pot to finish the dish.

While the potatoes simmered, I warmed the butter and milk.

Next, I created a mixture of melted butter and whole milk to infuse the cooked potatoes with rich, creamy flavor and texture.

A key step in Garten's recipe is to warm these two ingredients in a small saucepan while the potatoes cook. The butter will melt into the milk, causing an emulsion.

Dry spuds absorb hot liquids better than cold ones, and you'll have an easier time combining the ingredients without any cold lumps of butter.

Just don't let the mixture come to a boil, which can cause the milk to separate from the butter.

Then, I mashed the potatoes.

When the potatoes are done cooking, strain the water over the sink and return them to the pot. Now, it's time to start mashing.

Garten's recipe calls for using a food mill to break down the potatoes, but I live in a New York City apartment with barely enough room to store a large pot. So, I used a good old-fashioned potato masher.

Once I'd crushed the potatoes into a mostly uniform mush, I added the warm butter and incorporated it with a rubber spatula, per Garten's instructions.

I added just enough buttermilk for a super creamy mash.

Once you've folded the butter and milk into the potatoes, it's time for the star ingredient: buttermilk.

I halved Garten's recipe, which typically feeds five or six, and decided to add a half cup of buttermilk. At first, I was worried I'd overdone it — my mash looked soupy.

After a little more stirring and time, though, the starchy potatoes absorbed the buttermilk, and I had myself an incredibly light and fluffy mash.

The seasoning — and the buttermilk — made Garten's recipe stand out from the rest.

Adding the right amount of salt and pepper is essential for any dish, but mashed potatoes are often tragically overlooked in the seasoning department.

Garten recommends adding another 2 teaspoons of salt and pepper to the mash, and I agree wholeheartedly.

The result is a rich, tangy, and flavorful side dish you don't need to wait for a holiday to make. In my opinion, the buttermilk stole the show: I've found that potatoes can be a bit "blah" when not properly seasoned, and this recipe had a slightly acidic quality that I loved.

I'll be bringing these potatoes to Thanksgiving dinner this year, and every holiday party for the foreseeable future.

This story was originally published on November 20, 2025, and most recently updated on October 22, 2026.

• Two years ago, I moved to Spain, and began dating a Spaniard several months in.
• We had some immediate cultural clashes, mostly around communication and our argument styles.
• I've learned that being fluent in a language doesn't necessarily make communication easy.

I'd spent years learning Spanish before I moved to Spain, but once I arrived, I realized how much further I had to go before I could call myself fluent.

I consider myself "conversationally adjacent"; I'm a few neighborhoods over from fluent, but I still get lost.

So, when I started dating a Spaniard six months into moving here, I was fully prepared for regular vocabulary deficits and butchered grammar (especially with my archenemy, the subjunctive).

What I didn't expect was that even when I understood every word, I could still misunderstand the meaning behind it — because language was only part of the equation.

I was shocked when he called me 'ugly'

Early in our relationship, my Spanish boyfriend casually called me "fea" — literally "ugly" — and was baffled when I burst into tears.

To him, the word didn't carry the cruelty I heard in its English equivalent. In Spain, words like "fea" or "feo" are often used as playful terms of endearment. Understanding this, though, didn't make it hurt any less.

Another time, I asked him how to say "making out" in Spanish. He had no idea — and, in fact, he didn't even understand the concept when I explained it.

"You know," I said. "More than kissing, less than sex. The kind of thing teenagers do on the sofa while pretending to watch a movie." He looked at me like I had invented a new sport.

That was when I started to realize that I wasn't just learning Spanish, but discovering that dating comes with different assumptions in every culture.

We followed very different dating rules

After six months together, things were going really well, but my boyfriend and I still hadn't had "the talk."

Having lived in Canada and the US, I was used to relationships hitting a certain point when someone would say something along the lines of, "I really like you, and I think this is going well. Do you want to be in a relationship or date exclusively?"

When I brought this up, my boyfriend looked genuinely puzzled. So I asked how, in his experience, two people knew they were on the same page about progressing a relationship and not dating anyone else. He shrugged and told me that usually it's just assumed.

My mouth dropped open. "But what if you assume you're exclusive, and she assumes you're not, and it turns out she's dating other people?"

He shrugged again. "You just trust that you both feel the same way," he said.

My boyfriend isn't the only one who feels this way. After our discussion, I asked several Spanish friends about this, and they all said that neither they nor anyone they knew had ever had this conversation.

I've had to separate language, culture, and personality

Some differences are easy to laugh about later — like when we argued about "compromiso," a word I understood as "compromise" and he meant as "commitment" — but others are harder, because they're embedded in our DNA.

For instance, we argue in different ways. My boyfriend can feel ready to move on from disagreements moments after they happen. I, on the other hand, take a bit longer to recover.

Two years later, we're still together and still in love. We're also seeing a couples therapist who has experience with bicultural relationships, because not being quite fluent in each other's languages means we may understand most of the words, but we're sometimes still confused about what the other person is trying to say.

Our therapist is helping us see which misunderstandings are linguistic, which are cultural, and which are simply differences between two people.

Movies often make cross-cultural dating seem romantic — after all, body language is universal, wink, wink — but I beg to differ. Communication is supremely important when trying to build a life with someone.

So this relationship has forced both of us to assess our assumptions at every potential speed bump. Now, we ask: Is this cultural? Personal? A relationship incompatibility? Or just a "lost in translation" misunderstanding that we'll laugh about later?

• My husband and I wanted to live together before marriage, but our parents weren't happy about it.
• However, my in-laws said we could move into their house as long as we slept in separate rooms.
• Living under the same roof helped me better understand my husband and grow closer to his parents.

I started dating my husband, Daniel, during our junior year of college. However, our relationship was mostly long-distance when we were away from school. Arkansas was my home base, and Georgia was his.

Once we graduated, we even maintained our relationship while traveling and living in separate countries.

We knew our ultimate goal was to get married, and we didn't want to be in a long-distance relationship anymore. So, we discussed getting an apartment together, either in my hometown or his.

However, neither set of parents was happy about our potential plan to live alone together before marriage. Although Daniel and I no longer identify as religious, we both come from Christian families.

So, Daniel's parents, Martin and Louise, offered a compromise: We could move into their house — we just couldn't sleep in the same room.

Living with my in-laws before marriage sounded daunting, but it brought us closer

Religious motivation aside, Daniel's parents also wanted to give us a break on rent since we didn't have much money. By living with them, we'd be able to save for a down payment on a future home.

It seemed tempting, and we didn't want to take their kindness for granted. We ultimately agreed to this setup (and got engaged about a month before moving in), but I had my concerns.

I worried I'd clash with Daniel's parents over day-to-day issues. I liked them, but I didn't know them super well yet. What if we got on each other's nerves? I also didn't like the idea of someone else's religious ideals dictating how I lived.

Thankfully, though, most of my worries about living with my future in-laws turned out to be unwarranted.

We ate dinner together most nights, which meant I was lucky enough to enjoy an amazing home-cooked meal from Louise almost daily.

Martin and Daniel watched baseball on TV most nights, and I used the opportunity to learn about the sport and eventually became a ride-or-die Atlanta Braves fan.

Despite spending time together often, I still felt like I had my space. My in-laws both went to sleep early because they had to wake up early for work, so Daniel and I still had at least a couple of hours to ourselves at night.

Of course, we still had our problems. I still feel bad about repeatedly forgetting there was no garbage disposal and tossing eggshells into the sink, and I was constantly worried about waking them up at night since they were in bed by 9 p.m.

But overall, living together was a positive experience.

I got to know my husband and in-laws in ways I never would have otherwise

After 10 months, Daniel and I got married and moved out on our own. Looking back, I definitely found it valuable to live with him before we made that commitment.

Although Daniel and I slept in separate rooms, living under the same roof still offered a useful preview of married life. It also gave me a profound understanding not just of how Daniel acted, but of why.

Some of this was small. When he visited my family and stacked dishes in the sink instead of immediately putting them in the dishwasher, I considered it rude.

After about 20 meals with his family, I realized they always waited until the sink was full to load the dishwasher. He wasn't being lazy — he was acting in the way he had been raised.

Plus, it helped me better understand my future in-laws. Because of this, we rarely, if ever, have argued about them visiting or one of them hurting my feelings. This removes a layer of potential problems in my marriage.

Living with Daniel's parents could have strained my relationship with them, but it did the opposite. It brought us closer.

Our time together became even more valuable years later

My time living with them became relevant again about a decade later when my father-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Daniel and I were ready to move back in and help however we could. We ended up only having a few weeks with Martin before he died, and stayed for a while after to help Louise tie up loose ends, plan the funeral, and spend extra time with her.

For many people, living with their in-laws for six weeks would be beyond difficult. The emotional, stressful situation still made it hard at times.

However, I was used to living with Louise. I didn't have to tiptoe around the family. I knew how the dynamic worked.

Not only could I live with them for six weeks during a life-altering time, but I was more grateful than ever that I lived with them nearly a decade earlier. I realize now that I wouldn't have gotten to know Martin as well if I hadn't lived in his home.

• I spent years saving $50,000 for a kitchen remodel that'd give me the space of my dreams.
• I'm glad I kept my layout the same and chose a timeless color palette for the space.
• Reupholstering my dining chairs saved me money, but I wish I hadn't done this project during summer.

I hated my kitchen for 19 years and spent just as long saving to remodel it.

My goals were to build a bright, modern kitchen that was more functional, offered additional storage solutions, and created a cohesive look when viewed from the two entryways to my living room.

After spending nearly $50,000 on my kitchen remodel, there are a lot of choices I'm glad I made — and only one I really regret so far.

I'm glad I kept my kitchen layout the same.

Early on, one designer who bid on my project proposed removing some walls and the soffit ceiling and adding an island to help me reach my storage and design goals.

The idea sounded great in theory, but it would've put me about $20,000 over budget, between the construction, ductwork, and the need for taller cabinets to fill the higher ceiling space.

The designer I ended up hiring urged me to keep my current layout and showed me how we could do so while adding the functionality I wanted.

Choosing a timeless color palette makes me confident that the kitchen will age beautifully.

For years, I'd dreamt of an all-white kitchen because I loved its classic, clean look. However, as my designer and I began talking and looking at my Pinterest boards, she noticed I also loved black accents.

She took the black-and-white theme and ran with it, outfitting half my kitchen with white cabinets and charcoal countertops and the other half with black cabinets and a white countertop.

She also chose coordinating tile squares: shades of white around the kitchen and a bold graphic tile in the dining room area.

This palette feels truly timeless — and I am confident I'll love this design for decades to come.

Buying little things that bring me joy helped me complete my space.

It can be easy to focus all your attention on the bigger-ticket items while remodeling, but the details really matter.

For instance, I visited Kohler, Wisconsin — home of the Kohler Company that's best known for its plumbing products — years ago and became obsessed with its sleek sinks and faucets. So, naturally, that's what I chose for my new kitchen.

Similarly, my everyday dishes no longer matched my new aesthetic, so I gave them away in my local "Buy Nothing" group and upgraded to the cutest stoneware set from Stone Lain.

The dishes were pretty affordable and have totally elevated my tablescape.

Reupholstering my old dining-room chairs saved me a lot of money.

The table and chairs on the dining side of the kitchen were still in excellent shape, and the perfect size, but the drab gray fabric on the chairs was a real eyesore.

Instead of replacing the entire set, I spent $500 to have them reupholstered with a striking fabric my designer chose. They look brand new again and have such a playful vibe.

I don't regret spending more than half my budget on cabinets and countertops.

Aside from labor, I knew that my cabinets and countertops would be my biggest line items — but they were also the largest pieces in the room, so that was OK with me.

My designer steered me toward a local company that offered a great mid-tier option on factory cabinets (read: not high-end and not custom), and they still cost $15,000. To be fair, though, adding cabinets to the entire wall of the dining area played a major role in that price tag.

I also paid a little over $11,000 for quartz countertops because we needed three slabs for this design.

However, these things are the foundation of the kitchen, and I don't think I could've skimped on either one and still achieved my desired outcome.

Still, I wish I'd planned my remodel during a different season.

It didn't take me long to realize that summer in Phoenix was the wrong time for this project. It started in June and went into September during a record-breaking heat wave (70 days with highs at or above 110 degrees Fahrenheit).

Workers were in and out of the house all day, causing my poor AC unit to work overtime. If I ever do another remodel, it'll be during a more temperate time of year.

This story was originally published on November 17, 2024, and most recently updated on October 22, 2026.

• After our second child, my husband and I were struggling to balance our jobs and household admin.
• To outsource some of the cooking, I found a local chef to batch-cook meals for us once a month.
• Having a freezer packed with homemade meals saved us time, and I learned a lot from the chef.

When I returned to work after my second maternity leave, our family of four found ourselves very short on free time.

Back then, my husband and I had jobs in finance in London. We were working long hours, with video calls stretching from seven in the morning to nine at night.

On weekdays, like most families with young children, we felt like we were in a never-ending cycle of rushing everywhere. Our plates were filled with nursery drop-offs and pickups, Teams calls, making dinner, cleaning up, and getting the kids ready for bed and baths, with household chores and personal admin to be completed in what was left of our free time.

Though we had full-time childcare, we had little else in the way of daily support, as our families were not local.

In our social circle, we knew that dual-career parents with young children often bought supermarket-ready meals or ordered takeout. However, these options often felt too high in salt and sugar, and limited in their selection.

That was how I found myself posting in a Facebook group for Malaysian moms in the UK, desperately trying to find someone to cook for us.

I wasn't envisioning a personal chef who would shop and make three meals a day — our budget didn't stretch that far — rather, I hoped to find a decent home cook and had a few hours to make big, batch meals that we could freeze, then reheat on our busy weekdays.

That was how we found Evelyn.

For $150 a visit, we paid for someone to batch-cook meals for our family

Evelyn was an experienced pastry chef on furlough, like many in the food-service industry at the time — we connected in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

She lived in a neighboring borough in London, which made our arrangement convenient. Equally as important, she was good at cooking Chinese-Malaysian dishes.

She would visit once a month, for about four to six hours. Our arrangement cost us around $150 per visit at the time. Before she arrived, we would discuss the menu over WhatsApp. Crucially, the dishes had to be easy to freeze and easy to reheat.

I would then shop for the ingredients she needed, which meant a combination of online grocery shopping and trips to Chinatown for less-common items.

On her visit, she would cook large portions of three dishes, which she further subdivided into another three family-sized portions. In total, we had around nine portions, which were then packed into containers and frozen — like a supermarket-ready meal, but tastier and probably healthier.

The meals she cooked were Malaysian Nyonya or Chinese-Malaysian dishes: ayam tempra (chicken dish), chai boey (a delicious sour and spicy stew with leftover roast meat), babi pongteh (a braised pork dish), and chicken with ginger and spring onion.

The 4-year arrangement had both expected and unexpected benefits

As a result of Evelyn's visits, we did not spend precious hours batch cooking on the weekends. We could spend our limited free time with our children.

Although her meals did not completely replace the need for us to cook, the constant everyday drudgery of preparing food was partially mitigated. On weekdays, after a long day of work calls, I would grab a container out of the fridge and pair it with plain white rice.

And the biggest unexpected benefit was that she taught us more of my culture. Though I'm Chinese-Malaysian, I was never taught how to cook growing up. When I started living independently, my cooking repertoire did not extend much beyond pasta, curry chicken, and whatever I could learn from YouTube videos.

Nothing compares to being shown what to cook and how to do it by a more experienced person. It was a learning experience for me to hunt for the ingredients that Evelyn had asked for in the local Chinese grocery store. On one of my trips, I had gotten a vegetable that I believed to be kai choy (Chinese mustard green), only to be told by Evelyn that it was choy sum (Chinese flowering cabbage).

By watching her, I also learned about different types of tofu and which work best for various dishes, plus how to get a good sear on meat (very high heat and a willingness to tolerate oil splatter).

Evelyn continued to come to our place every month or so until we left London about four years later. We did not restart an arrangement like this in our new place, as the kids were older and our jobs were more flexible.

I am a firm believer that you have to make your own village in this modern world, especially for those of us who have found careers far away from our families of origin. So I am forever grateful to Evelyn for her help in the intense years with babies and young children.

We had been looking for a "batch-cooking service," but instead we got a stand-in "aunty."

• I used to work as a flight attendant, and I prefer passengers keep the shades closed during flights.
• Passengers are typically calmer and sleepier when the cabin is dark, which worked well for us.
• Shades should only be open during takeoff and landing, which is the best time for photos anyway.

There's a long-standing, quiet battle happening in airplane cabins around the world, and it's all about window shades.

Who actually owns control of the shade — the person sitting in the window seat, the cabin crew, or the row as a collective? (Opinions remain fairly divided.) Is it better for the shade to stay open or closed throughout the flight?

Between viral social media debates and endless discussions on flight etiquette, everyone seems to have an opinion, and so do I. For nearly a decade, I worked as a flight attendant with an international airline.

That means I've examined thousands of window shades before takeoff and landing to ensure they were open, just as I checked seatbacks were upright.

Many airlines require the shades to be open during these times, which makes sense to me from a safety standpoint. It's helpful to have a clear view outside in an emergency, and in case ground rescue teams need to see inside the plane.

However, once we hit cruising altitude, those safety rules pause, and my personal one kicks in: The window shades should be closed while we're in the air.

I've found that open shades can ruin sleep cycles and make a cabin rowdier

I honestly hate it when passengers keep their shades wide open, and it's especially bad on long, international flights. I know firsthand how crossing multiple time zones can be exhausting for the body.

Often, the best way to save passengers from severe jet lag is to help them get quality sleep in the air — and let's be honest, as a flight attendant, I definitely had a vested interest in keeping everyone happy and well-rested.

So, on long flights, my crew and I would intentionally dim the cabin lights to simulate nighttime and encourage everyone to rest. Even so, it only took one open window shade to ruin that peaceful environment for an entire section of the plane.

When blinding sunlight poured in, it didn't just wake sleeping passengers — it also created a terrible glare on laptops, tablets, and phones.

I've lost track of how many frustrated passengers rang their call buttons to complain to me about it, and how often I ended up having to mediate arguments about window shades.

Early on in my career, I also observed how ambient light seemed to directly change passenger behavior. Whenever we dimmed the cabin lights, travelers seemed to naturally settle down, read quietly, or go to sleep.

But when a flight stayed brightly lit, passengers more often stayed awake, chatted loudly, and ordered more alcohol, sometimes turning the flight into a party.

All in all, keeping the cabin dark tended to make the entire flight so much calmer, safer, and easier for us to manage. As my colleagues and I always used to say: A sleeping passenger is the best passenger!

If you're looking for good views and photos, you're better off waiting anyway

One of the most common reason passengers give for keeping their shades up is to take photos or enjoy the view. Although I completely understand the desire for a great aerial shot, the reality at 35,000 feet is usually underwhelming.

Most of the time, all you can see out the window is blinding white haze, cloud cover, or vast emptiness. The direct sunlight at high altitudes is often too harsh for a clean picture anyway.

If you really want great photos for your travel feed, the best time to take them is during descent and approach.

As the plane lowers toward the destination, you can actually get a clear, detailed view of cities, coastlines, and landscapes — and during those moments, the shades are already usually required to be open for safety reasons anyway.

Ultimately, though, the status of the shade is up to the passenger

Unlike takeoff and landing, where keeping shades open is often a mandatory safety rule, mid-flight shade policy is more about etiquette.

As flight attendants, we couldn't strictly enforce or mandate that passengers close them, as window-shade status isn't regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration.

However, many of us made a point of strongly requesting and encouraging the shades to be shut for the comfort of the whole cabin.

Now, whenever I'm sitting in the window seat as a passenger, I practice what I preach. The shade stays wide open for takeoff, goes straight down as soon as we hit cruising altitude, and pops back up on our final approach.

Pulling that shade down mid-flight is a tiny move, but it makes a world of difference. It can help keep the cabin dark and calm, let your fellow passengers sleep, and prevent a full-blown glare dispute at 35,000 feet.