One year ago today it was my fifth day living in Lisbon, Portugal. Lisbon is my favourite European city, I tell everyone this. I’d choose it as my base over London, I’d spend all my European summers there, I’d brace the ice-cold ocean and the end of summer sandstorms, and I’d visit the same places and hope they were still there, maybe even with the same people I went there with.
I say this because Lisbon is a city where everyone is always leaving. The last time I went, I celebrated a friend’s three-year Lisbon birthday, made friends with her friends whose very first questions were ‘how long are you here for?’ and the next day attended a goodbye dinner for my closest friend who was flying back to Switzerland after a year in this western-most city of seven hills.
The first time I visited Lisbon was in 2017. I had just graduated. I was very unemployed as we all were, and so my friends and I booked a £60 return ticket to somewhere in Europe, somewhere close; Lisbon? we thought. It seemed good enough a place to both forget our three years of intense studies and also complete the cycle: we’d receive our final results while on a train from Faro to Lisbon.
Lisbon seemed so alive but unpretentious about its vitality. I came home and called it the most non-European European capital city. The Angolan, Mozambican, and Cape Verdean restaurant presence plus the outdoor Samba parties and the ease of Summer convinced me. I loved the way that multiple versions of Portuguese co-existed in one place, sometimes one mouth, how loud but airy it seemed to be everywhere, how you might retreat from your hilly walk and stumble upon something accidentally quaint or perfect for resting and drinking something that would be unnecessary or expensive somewhere else. Also, how actually romantic the city was. I took a trip to the beach on the Cascais line one day and noticed how a young couple would stand in the centre of the walkway on the overground train, absorbed in their kiss. Nobody bothered them, not one person tutted when they had to walk around them to get off the train, they simply allowed space enough for this romantic moment to happen uninterrupted. It mattered to none of the elders nor the youngest children on the train that they were, or almost, in love. I decided in that moment that Lisbon was the most romantic of the cities I’d seen so far (indirectly meaning more than Paris).
This time around I was in Lisbon on my own, in the surrendering of summer and the promise of fall. I came back to Lisbon after post-grad life had taken me to the depths of 9-5, of leaving it multiple times, of living in Central America and Mexico, and realising that sometimes, life gifts you enough grace to strip the romance from the cities themselves and endow it to the brave souls making it work wherever they are, whoever they’re with, be it in the centre of a changing city, on a moving train, lip to lip, or otherwise.
By October 30th, I knew that I preferred lands where the coconut oil is always pure, melted, tinted with a roasted scent and where there is always a need to sweep sand out of the house, empty it from bags, wash it from hair with superficial annoyance. Two months. I decided this was enough time for me to spend in Lisbon before the magic would wear off, heading home for the holidays and then packing again to head back out into my preferred part of the world to start 2023.
On the 29th I would walk around what felt like a stately but abandoned part of Oeiras, searching for an ad or a home-like neighbourhood to research later, but primarily, filling time, leaving friends long voice notes so I didn’t feel so alone. Following the long road to the beach where everyone was drinking their Saturday morning coffee and smiling at each other, ignoring the dark clouds from behind their sunglasses, I decided to accept that there was nothing about the area that would make me feel comfortable for two months. It could not be home.
On the 31st I would join an African history walking tour and find out what used to happen to the Africans in the city and learn also, where the current Africans stay, eat, dance in peace in this city that pretends to be open and liberal and safe, especially in June. On this day though, it was Sunday, the 30th, and I was going to use my good memory to take myself where I figured would be perfect for me.
Since I travel slowly, I like to be sure about where I settle down and call home while on the road. I barely like to book long-term rentals without being in the space first. My first Airbnb was on the other side of the river. It didn’t feel like the Lisbon I remembered. It felt like a village where the tram slowly eases its way through the tiny town that is actually a metropolis and a hub yet where the cars seem never to be in a rush. Here, the fruterías seemed unchanged from about 25 years previous. The hair salons still mounted posters of outdated and unreplicable hairstyles and the police station looked uninhabited and washed out in colour but not empty yet. The hills on this side of the river lacked all glamour; there was nothing trendy waiting at the top, no hill-top rooftop bar, no vintage market inside of an abandoned factory, only the garden chairs dragged outside the houses of the elders who wish to speak to each other from across the road. This way, they catch brief glimmers of sun and avoid wasting a day inside, so they can properly gossip and watch all they know- have known - and the few they do not. I stayed here for some time, buying oranges with leaves on them and stopping at the florist’s to see which flowers I would buy, hypothetically, if I had a place I was living in to trim them and place them in the centre of a table in a third-floor living room. Even better if in an area I remembered being good.
I wanted to find myself somewhere to stay, not right in the thick of the excitement, but not too far that my weak Portuguese would fail and isolate me. I wanted, like always, to create a home for a bit. I decided to head to Ajuda, to revisit the area we had stayed in during our first group trip to Lisbon. I spent the entire day excited to retrace my steps. I’d lost the booking email from my old email account and so I’d ask a friend from the first trip. She emailed it over but the listing was no longer available. This meant that it was probably not a rental anymore (a good 5 years later) but still, I wanted to try and see if there was maybe, any indication of the possibility of renting, an ‘alojamiento’ sign or a number in the window. But mostly I just wanted to return to that house and the feelings I remembered it bringing.
Sometimes, I am extremely regimental. I was raised as the eldest girl-child to two Caribbean parents. I was to be pretty sensible as default, according to them both. There has been some unlearning that has come with this, an easing and an opening of the heart and resting the mind’s discipline. But I cherish my responsible, quick-decision-makingness. I quickly decided that despite the odds, this trip would be worth it because I wanted it, and because it was a slow Sunday afternoon.
By October 30th 2022, I had also been living nomadically for the best part of a year and a half. I had been living out of a backpack and off the kindness and knowledge of people who were from the places I was not. I mean that I learnt how to expand ‘what made sense’. What makes sense in London, doesn’t make sense in a mountain town in Chiapas. What becomes the logical step in Belize, is not the logical step in Lisbon. I knew that in Europe, I could roam the streets all day looking for a place that aligns with my budget, comfort and vision and come home hungry. I knew that I wanted to go for the memory. To see if the area, if not the house, would be accessible to me or at the very least, make me feel some familiarity before the real house hunt began.
I remembered that back in 2017, our train stop was always Belém. It was always night and I was never the one in charge of navigating the group (I was in charge of merging Spanish with Portuguese to read menus and speak to taxi drivers with varying degrees of luck and laughter), so I barely remembered the way. All I knew was that I’d remember the space once I arrived. I got off at the correct train stop and walked, I kid you not, simply upwards. I had no address, just knowledge that Ajuda was located north of Belém, and so up the hilly street I went, in one straight line.
Ajuda felt weird. I do remember this actually, but I was 21 in Europe with my friends and no real plan or need to make one as yet, taking pictures and getting lost. Why would I care on this 5-day trip, about a weird neighbourhood? This time round I knew it, my sensitivities had developed stronger as they do when you’re alone. I didn’t want to live here for two months. I just wanted ease, to walk in my old steps, bring myself back to an old memory and an old home. The tiny house was there. The yellow paint less vibrant, and the neighbourhood less active than I remembered. There was no number to call but it didn’t matter. I took a picture to send it to some of the girls later on, with the caption ‘Remember this little spot?’
And I felt just that. Heading back to a place where I essentially began my love for this city and this long-term travelling lifestyle, where I began falling comfortable living in new homes for months at a time and where nothing mattered but where we would eat dinner or go dancing or whether we’d make it to the art gallery before it shuts and why I was always the last to get ready. It was just a holiday and this was just the rental and the street that all the neighbours helped us locate. This is where we’d walk to the supermarket for breakfast and try to remember who liked coffee and who tea, also, where we found out about the Grenfell tower burning down back in London while we were away.
I ended October 30th in a bar off the iconic Pink Street at an Afro Beats party. I met many people here. An artist from Edinburgh who wore all black and multi-coloured jewellery that dangled down to her navel, with an afro-puff mohawk who came back to Lisbon, retracing her steps just like me. The friend I would make who would sit with me and swap notes on the places we have been and would and wouldn’t recommend to another Black woman. The Nigerian who would ask us why/how we’re sitting down at an Afro Beats party and would we like to be ‘just jisting’ on the dance floor maybe. We’d have a gorgeous agreed-upon almost relationship for the next two months; lots of well-placed Spanish this time, kisses on as many viewing points as the city has, useless debates, and obvious incompatibility as two outspoken twenty-somethings hell-bent on living elsewhere. But before then we’d cackle and all swap numbers and make friends at the party.
This time last year I spent the whole day going back to a good memory so I could feel how much of it does not belong to this trip. It was a goodbye and a ‘breathe it in’ and a welcome back to where you’ve never really been before.