Nine days into deliberately avoiding anything that looked like a tour bus stop, I woke up and decided today would be the exception, on purpose, just this once.
It started small: a shave, which meant finding a barber that opened early, did not charge tourist prices, and spoke enough English that I would not end up with a mustache I had not asked for. I found one two streets from the hostel, in and out inside twenty minutes, freshly shaved for a day that was, unusually for this trip, mostly about being photographed.
I cut through Praca do Comercio on the way, the river facing square that has been doing the same quiet, oversized magnificence since the eighteenth century, and kept walking up into Alfama toward Miradouro de Sao Vicente, where my photographer was waiting.
Same setup as London: a photoshoot booked through Airbnb weeks before I left New York, coordinates and a time and a stranger with a camera who would already be there when I arrived. Miradouro de Sao Vicente turned out to be the unpolished cousin of Lisbon's more famous viewpoints, a concrete terrace with skaters working one corner and the city's rooftops doing the rest of the job for free. We shot there first, caught tram 28 rattling past on its narrow rails the way it has for a century, and moved on to Miradouro de Santa Luzia, all blue tile and pergola and a view that has clearly been photographed a few million times before mine, deservedly. We wound through a few more corners of Alfama after that, narrow enough in places that my photographer and I had to take turns deciding who backed up first.
I was free by one, which should have meant heading straight into the afternoon. Instead my phone buzzed with a text from the hostel reception: because Lisbon would not give me one clean three night booking, I had split it into two bookings back to back, and I had quietly forgotten to check out of the first one. I went back, sorted it out, and did not properly check back in until three, which is a remarkably efficient way to lose two hours of a day I did not have much of to spare in the first place.
Turning tourist for an afternoon
What was left of the day went to Baixa, the one deliberately touristic stretch I allowed myself this entire trip. Rua Augusta earned its reputation, cobblestones laid in the traditional wave pattern, street performers working the crowd, cafes spilling out under awnings, running straight down to the triumphal arch at Praca do Comercio with its own viewing platform up top. The Santa Justa lift stood exactly where the guidebooks put it, an iron elevator from 1902 built by an engineer who clearly idolized Eiffel, tourists queued up for a ride to a platform that looks back down on the very street they just walked. I did not queue. I looked, decided the view from Santa Luzia that morning had already spoiled me, and kept walking down toward Cais do Sodre instead, past the edge of Pink Street, painted exactly as advertised, quiet in the way any nightlife street is at four in the afternoon.
