Lisbon, and Jennifer’s Arms in the Air
The tuk-tuk hits a gap between cobblestones and Jennifer throws her arms up, whooping. Her black hair whips across her face. We’re careening through Alfama—Lisbon’s oldest quarter—and things are flying past: kids waving from doorways, a woman yelling at no one visible, men watching from stoops with the slow, tolerant faces of people who have clocked faster traffic than this for six hundred years. Fish on ice. Walls covered in azulejo tiles. Jennifer is a producer—Taiwan via Beijing via Berlin via everywhere—and she’d been telling me about Taiwanese food, which led to life in Peking, which led to the Tokyo subway, which led somewhere I no longer remember. I matched her with Toronto landscapes and the Italian coast and we traded cities back and forth like that until the tuk-tuk lurched and she whooped, and her enormous black sunglasses caught the sun, and she smiled at a stranger, and the stranger smiled back. Today we’re free, here in Lisbon. The city is in love with us.
Sony had brought a group of journalists and bloggers out to launch the Xperia Z1—their new Android flagship—on the rooftop terrace of the Memmo Alfama, a design hotel that had just opened in the heart of the old city. The view up there was the kind that makes you briefly furious at your regular life: wide Atlantic, hot sun, cold cocktail. One of the waiters delivered the new phone to me floating in a glass of water—it’s waterproof, that was the bit—and the crowd went appropriately charmed. For the next few hours everyone was too busy running the camera and the LTE network to remember what phone they’d come with. Several iPhones sat abandoned on the appetizer table.
The guest list was a specific kind of strange. These were people I mostly knew from the internet—in some cases for years—and suddenly we were sharing a rooftop and a pool and a boat. Jasmin and Isabella, who ran a small art blog, sat nearby sketching on their screens. Anna and her boyfriend Jakob were photographing each other in the afternoon light. By the pool, Katja, Lara, and Frank from I Heart Berlin stood watching the water. There were also people from newspapers and TV and agencies, but the internet contingent was the interesting one. That particular weirdness of press trips: a school excursion where everyone is pretending to be a professional.
Lisbon absorbed all of it without effort. It’s a big city that moves like a small village—labyrinthine alleys producing surprises around every corner, signs from a vanished empire maintained with a pride that reads as neither nostalgic nor defensive, just factual. This country built ships and went to sea. We found ourselves on speedboats and sailboats, salt water in our faces, and something about the spray and the horizon and the blinding light off the water woke up a love for the ocean I’d apparently forgotten I had.
The days ran like a highlight reel of someone else’s better life. American comfort food at The Decadente, Mediterranean things at Bica do Sapato, elaborate cold drinks on the roof of a club while someone lit sparklers over our heads. The weeks before this trip—packet noodles, Berlin autumn closing in—had no purchase here. The only complaint anyone managed was about the orange juice coming from a carton one morning. We were not in a position to complain.
And then it ended. Return flight, grey sky waiting as promised. The fresh color drains out of your face somewhere over Frankfurt. The Berlin autumn sky doesn’t welcome you home so much as inform you it was right all along—it was always going to be this way, and you should stop acting surprised. A cynical sky, the Berlin autumn sky. Welcome back. It doesn’t mean it.
What Lisbon left me with was a city I’d somehow never put on any list, which was obviously wrong. The place has enough beauty and strangeness to make you feel like you’re spending your time correctly just by walking through it. I don’t need a product launch to justify that. I should have gone years ago.
The morning after getting back, I took the SIM out of my iPhone 4 and put it in the Xperia Z1. The screen is large and sharp, the design unmistakably Japanese in its combination of precision and restraint. My affection for Apple had been cooling for a while anyway—the company had slid from counterculture alternative into its own kind of dictatorship, the same controlling instincts it once positioned itself against. Maybe this is the moment for Sony to make a case: real cameras, proper hardware, a coherent lineup of phones and laptops and consoles converging into something with actual intent. The opportunity exists. That’s not too much to say.
Jennifer’s laugh cuts through all of it. Her white blouse and thin black pants flutter in the wind, her feet in light-brown shoes pressed against the front seat, her bra visible at the collar in a way that doesn’t seem accidental. The people around us—locals, tourists—smile at her. She waves back at all of them. The sea flashes between the buildings. Today we’re free, here in Lisbon. The city is in love with us.