Forty-Eight Hours in Lisbon With No Plan

We arrived without a map and left without a schedule. What we found in between is the only kind of travel I still believe in.

We landed on a Friday with nothing booked past the first night. No itinerary, no list of the ten things you must see before you die. Just a small hotel in Alfama and two days to let the city decide.

What Lisbon decides, it turns out, is that you should walk uphill until your legs complain, then reward yourself with a coffee you did not plan to have. The trams groan past. The tiled walls hold the afternoon light like something warm you could keep.

The best mornings were the ones we could not have planned.

By Sunday we had eaten the same custard tart four times, learned the names of exactly two streets, and forgotten the rest on purpose. We left lighter than we arrived — which is, I think, the whole point.