Leaving Lisbon

We have been in Alfama for six weeks, which is longer than we planned, and we are leaving tomorrow.

The bags are out. The apartment looks like it belongs to someone else again, which is always the strange part of leaving a rented place. How quickly it stops being yours.

Six weeks is long enough to stop being a tourist in a neighborhood and start being something slightly more difficult to define. The woman at the corner café stopped asking what we wanted after the third day. The cat on the steps of the miradouro learned that Rita would stop to acknowledge it and I would not. The steep alleys, which nearly finished us in the first week, became something we navigated without thinking.

Alfama is not an easy place to live in. The streets were not designed for anyone in a hurry, which is either a feature or a problem depending on your relationship with being in a hurry. The cobblestones are polished to a degree that makes them genuinely dangerous when it rains, and it rained several times. We fell into the rhythm of it anyway. The slow mornings, the long lunches, the evenings where fado drifted up from somewhere below and you stopped what you were doing without deciding to.

We’ve learned that quiet moments of reflection are made sweeter by the melancholy strains of fado drifting on the breeze. 

 

We ate sardines at an unreasonable number of meals. They were correct every time.

 

The neighborhood has been here for a thousand years and will be here long after the current wave of tourists and renovation and shortterm rentals has passed through and become history itself. The medieval walls do not especially care about any of this. Neither do the cats.

We are leaving tomorrow. Our legs feel relieved. The rest of us is less sure.

Obrigado, Alfama.