Seven Hills, Six Espressos
Lisbon does not flatten itself for anybody — and after four days of climbing, I stopped asking it to.
The first thing Lisbon teaches you is that a map is a liar. Two streets look adjacent, and they are — vertically. What the map calls a shortcut is a staircase with a handrail worn smooth by a century of people who also thought it was a shortcut.
day 1 — bought the tram pass. used it twice. walked everywhere anyway.
I had four days and no plan beyond a vague intention to walk until something stopped me. Something always did: a tiled façade halfway up a hill, a man selling roasted chestnuts out of a converted shopping trolley, a doorway with six different bells and no names.
The espresso arithmetic
A bica costs less than a euro and takes about ninety seconds to drink standing at the counter. This is not a coffee culture built around laptops. You arrive, you drink, you go. By day two I had absorbed the rhythm well enough to use it as punctuation — one at the bottom of a hill, one at the top, and the hill in between stopped being a complaint.
Six espressos in one day is not a personal best. It's a topographical necessity.
the cheapest one was the best one. this keeps happening.
Alfama is where the walking stopped being transport and became the point. The streets there predate the idea that streets should go somewhere. They fold back, dead-end into someone's laundry, open without warning onto a view of the Tagus that would be roped off and ticketed anywhere else.
What I got wrong
I budgeted two hours for the castle and spent four. I skipped the aquarium because it sounded touristy and heard about it from three separate people afterwards. I tried to eat dinner at seven and found the city entirely uninterested — nothing really starts until nine, and nobody is in a hurry about it after that either.
On the last evening I climbed to a miradouro I'd already been to twice, mostly out of stubbornness, and sat on the wall until the light went orange and then purple and then off. Somebody two benches down was playing guitar badly and nobody minded. That's the page. That's the whole entry, really — the rest is just how I got up the hill.
next: Porto? or straight to Seville. decide at the station.