Arrival in Lisbon
I left New York 2 weeks ago. Here are some reflections.
Saturday, 22.00 hrs
I get off the bus with three girls I met last week: Alina from Milan, Nora from Madrid, and Shana from Buenos Aires. One of them heard about an experimental “music show” from a guy she went on a first (and last) date with.
We arrive at the venue, and it’s the kind of place most people would reach and definitively conclude they had the wrong address, if only because one of the front doors was missing. We ascend the winding stairs, and reach an unmarked door. Out of it spills the lulling sounds of deep-toned music and relaxed chatter. What gives us pause is not the smell of wet dog, or the visceral, lingering feeling that you’re in a bathroom at a frat house, but something a bit more surprising:
“There’s a cover.”
Two glasses of red wine and an entrancing electronic DJ set later, I am chatting under red lights with a 6-foot-something 29 y/o architect/model from Chile.
"So why did you come here?”
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There is something irreplaceable about patina and the visible age of worn-in, beloved cities. I was in an airbnb in the old part of the town last week, and every morning when I’d step outside, I was greeted by the worn, warm face of history; on the weathered tiles on the building façades, in between the cobblestone smoothed over by centuries of puttering soles, in the faces of the people walking by (with wrinkles so deep they’d make my mother tremble). In these streets, kneaded from a logic I cannot deduce, I feel the imprint of previous generations, people who lived their whole lives right here. It feels like an embrace from the past.
Trailing this feeling every morning is an acute awareness of the contrast to the city from which I came — a city that does, in fact sleep, but is woken up from A) a frantic stress dream at 5:40 am by a 20-second honk from a cab driver or B) a light shove from the subway conductor telling you to get up; to the city that is in a constant state of tearing itself down and rebuilding itself back up; to a city with a revolving door of residents, who come in bright-eyed and full of dreams, only to get spit out 3 years later like sour milk, or hardened like rocks in a riverbed, swearing that this is the only place they can be happy (red flag).
To me, this is the greatest gift of an old city: it restores our connection to the past, locates us in time, and puts into perspective our present and future. Being here in a city settled in 1128(!) is giving me a tangible sense of relationality to the broader human story that I think we, in our comparably young & crowded American cities, explicitly lack. In a city that can nearly drown you in skyscrapers (New York City), the pressure and weight on the individual is enormous, unspoken, and an individually-internalized experience. To some, the city’s grandeur makes them feel alive and important, but my question remains: When you have to fight the city itself in order to feel seen, heard, or even see the sunset, how can you put your life in perspective? or evaluate what is meaningful to you? Which takes me back to the red wine, red lights, and abandoned social-club-turned-alternative-performance-space where I relayed this sentiment to the Chilean architect/model (whose name is escaping me but is probably Pedro)… *
“Yes. Talking to Americans sometimes… well I don’t mean to generalize, but it’s like they can't think outside themselves. It’s what makes them so different.”
I will add though, that I think every place has its blind spots. I’ve noticed here, for example, a dearth in conversation about the Israel-Hamas war (save for ‘Free Palestine’ graffiti markings written in English). This silence has been both relieving, and eerily deafening. Perhaps Portugal is more seeped in the past than it is in the present, and that may have unexpected consequences for its future.
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To end, here is a snippet from one of my favorite moments of the last two weeks. It’s an audio recording from a very traditional & intimate music bar I went to. The night ended after I passed my date a vape he didn’t know was weed. He had a coughing fit (listen for it), I knocked over both our glasses of wine, and the performers stopped playing altogether. I will carry that shame to my grave … Enjoy xD
*Confirmed, his name is Pedro. He is now a friend
