Lisbon
The tuk-tuk bounces hard over the cobblestones, and Jennifer’s next to me throwing her arms up. She’s the producer on this trip, dark hair whipping in the wind. A few minutes before we were talking about Taiwanese food, Beijing, Berlin. I was countering with Tokyo subway lines, landscapes around Toronto, the usual comparative geography that happens when you travel with someone who’s lived in three countries. Then the tuk-tuk hits something and she’s laughing, really laughing, the kind where you forget to be self-conscious. Her oversized black sunglasses are sliding down. The city’s moving past us in streaks—painted tiles on the buildings, old women hanging laundry, a restaurant sign in blue and white.
We’re here because someone decided it was a good idea to fly out a group of people to see something new. The logistics are elaborate and strange. There’s a rooftop at a hotel called Memmo Alfama, wide views of the Atlantic, too much money in the air. But the actual moment is simple: sun in your face, cold drink in your hand, the knowledge that you can just be here without the weight of anything else. No Berlin winter waiting. No ramen budget. No refresh of email. Just this.
What I remember most is the relief of it. That sounds dramatic but it’s true. We’d been living on practically nothing that fall—financial miscalculation, the kind that stretches across months and becomes a thing you’re just managing. You don’t realize how small it makes you feel until someone says yes, we’ll fly you to Portugal for a weekend. Then suddenly you’re eating real food, tasting wine that doesn’t come in a box, sitting in restaurants where the light is warm instead of fluorescent. The city doesn’t care about your circumstances. It just is—messy and old and beautiful in that European way where nothing’s been erased.
Lisbon itself is a labyrinth. The streets wrap around each other in a way that makes no map sense. You can see the water from almost everywhere but you can’t figure out how to get to it. There are tiles everywhere—geometric patterns on buildings, scenes from history, the whole city is a surface you could read if you had the language. The maritime past is still alive in it. You can feel the trade routes, the people who left, the sea captains, the whole weight of a city that used to send ships everywhere and now just sits on a hill and lets tourists find it.
The people we were with were interesting in the way travel companions sometimes are. Mostly strangers, some of them people you knew slightly from the internet, all of us thrown together. There’s a particular kind of camaraderie in that situation—you’re not close enough to have pretense, but you’re trapped together by circumstance in a way that makes you honest. Conversations drift between food and travel and work and nothing at all. Someone’s taking photographs. Someone’s drawing on their laptop. Everyone’s noticing the light. It’s the feeling you get on school trips when you’re old enough to actually like the people around you.
We went from restaurant to restaurant. I kept ordering fish because it tasted like actual fish, not like something that came from a frozen box. There was wine. There was bread that had crust. These are stupid things to be amazed by but they made me realize how much the previous months had been a grind, how you adjust downward without noticing until suddenly you’re back up. The beach was there if you wanted it. The clubs on rooftops. The narrow restaurants where everyone knows each other. Portugal has this lightness to it—a different pace. People don’t perform as much. There’s less anxiety in the air.
And then it’s Sunday and you’re at the airport and the gray sky of Berlin is waiting. You know the moment the plane lands and you walk out and feel that cool air. The relief is gone. You’re back in the system. The city doesn’t care about you anymore. It was fine before you arrived and it’s fine after you leave. The warmth drains out of your face. The memories start to feel like they happened to someone else. By Tuesday you’re back in the rhythm and the trip is already becoming a story you tell rather than something that happened to you.
What stays with you from something like that is odd. A particular moment in a restaurant. Jennifer’s laugh. The specific angle of light through a narrow street. A taste you’re trying to remember. The actual texture of the trip is already gone. You can’t get that back no matter how many photographs you took. What you’ve got is the knowledge that the city exists and that you were there and that it was good. And that’s probably enough. You don’t need to have changed. You don’t need a moral. You just lived for a few days in a different frame and then came back. The thing is that it never lasts—the freedom, the ease, the sense that something has shifted. But while it’s happening, it’s real.