Or you could notice the birds

A trip to Lisboa

Bristol Airport is wet. In fact, everywhere in the south-west is saturated. For weeks, months, it has been raining and we are in desperate need of a change of atmosphere. Upon a friend’s recommendation, we decide to visit Lisboa for a few days.

We catch the late afternoon flight and as we climb through the soft dove clouds - how can this blue-blue skyworld be just here, just out of reach - I press my forehead on the windowpane and trace the edgelands of Europe. There is the crenated coastline of Bretagne, the vast navy-blue ocean of Biscay with flecks of white kicking up by the wind, the long straight beachlines of Portugal. We drift slowly amongst giant fantastical towers of cumulus. A portent of the time of light coming. The sun lowers on our southbound journey and with it the sky turns peach, salmon, amber. Oh, the light, these western lands. I will mourn the loss of our European citizenship until my dying day.

We land. We practice our rusty Portuguese with the passport man and find our way across the subway, trying to pronounce the unfamiliar names on the vermehla (red) line. Encarnaçaõ, Oriente, Cabo Ruivo, Chelas, Bela Vista, change at Alameda, stop at Martim Moniz. We emerge into a shadowy praça, through lingering groups of men chatting and smoking, and find a dark narrow street as the map suggests, up into the city. Everything is unfamiliar until it isn’t. The cobbles catch our unknowing feet and shine in the occasional sodium streetlight. We look out over low walls, to the city lights beneath us, out to the pink lighthouse, beyond to the dark river-sea: orientating ourselves, locating ourselves in place. Our home for the next four nights is a small apartment in an old building on Rua de Veronica, with shutters on each deep window, silent streets below us. A notice pinned to the wall informs us of the Quiet Times, between 20:00 and 07:00. The only sound in the neighbourhood is the guest in the apartment above us, snoring softy through the night.

The next morning there is blue sky, soft pink walls and the sun glancing off terracotta tiles. I crane my neck at the window to look down to the praça but the street curves away. The first sounds of the flea market bounce up the street and call us out into the world. At the café on the corner, a minute’s skip down into Santa Clara, I place my cardamon bun and cortado on the table outside and drink in the sunlight as it limns the river below. For the first time, I appreciate the height that we are at, on one of the city’s seven hills.

I have always loved to travel, but I have not always found it easy. Trips planned in my teens and twenties were plagued with traumatic events: a relationship break-up on the northern coast of Spain, the cancellation of a conservation trip in Mallorca that no-one told me about until I arrived on the island, a stomach infection in Pakistan. For years, I thought I was blighted and unsuited for travel, until I steeled myself to try once more and travel for five months across Australia alone. Something clicked into place there, some nub of confidence emerged, and I entered a phase in my life when travel was easier. But, since the pandemic, as for many of us, some of my resilience has worn off. Menopause has brought its own psychological challenges, with anxiety about imagined scenarios never far from my mind. Looking back, I see how the first day in each new place presents a unique set of challenges: to adjust, to place ourselves, to find our feet, to root ourselves in something that matters beyond looking. For heaven’s sake, I wrote my PhD on how encounters with others are mediated through our emotional and visceral bodies, but this first day in Lisboa I forget all this. We walk for miles across the city, up into the castle where soft sunshine warms the old stones, and umbrella pines frame the city vista. We return exhausted to the apartment in the afternoon and I write:

Travel, you strange beast. Confronted with our raw selves, we skim the surface of this world and touch nothing with depth. I am gifted with the thing I crave most, time, but it swills around me, sloshing and slooping, until I am awash with the stuff and it is too much. Is it fatigue? Or is it an ever recurrent, aching loneliness that is in no way salved by loosening myself on the world? We make no connections beyond the scope of the locals’ polite and enthusiastic, but ultimately tourist-fuelled, business-minded greetings. We cling to each other until our raw skins in the world become too sensitive even to each other. What to do? I pause, rest, write. I wonder how we are made for this, navigating the world, anchoring nowhere, complicit in the ocular lie that social media has fed us. I hear strange voices in the street. I have no clue what they're saying.

There are many things in Lisboa to notice, to catch one’s eye, to focus on. You can pay attention to the faded glory of the central city: catalogue the tiled facades that glow in the late afternoon light, marvel at the old intricate doors, and look for cats or art or faces in the windows. You can inhale the grandeur that characterises the great rebuilding of the city following the great earthquake of 1755.

Or you can choose to be distracted by the graffiti that coats almost every flat surface - most being unintelligible to the passer-by but some are great artistic endeavours that warrant their own walking tour. Perhaps you can focus on the ground beneath your feet: cobbles made of limestone and black basalt, too numerous to appreciate the craft and likely decades-long project to cover each pavement and praça with small square tiles, each placed askance to its neighbour creating beautiful patterns. You can stand and stare at the marble steps smoothed with age, or step across the travertine limestone flags that are surprisingly unslippery in the rain. Or you can opt for that old travel favourite and people-watch: the children off to school carrying grown-up umbrellas for later, couples wandering and taking photographs, waiting staff hovering, menus in hand, hoping to catch people passing by. Street cleaners wheeling their trolleys up impossibly steep slopes.

We notice all these things, but we also notice the birds. The first ones we spot are representations - three ceramic andorinhas (swallows) standing proud on a picture hanging on our apartment wall, reaching for the air beyond the window. Later, we take in the crowds of ceramic birds laid out in souvenir shops (there’s a National Geographic article about these I discover later). Then, there’s the printed silhouette of a swallow flyposted on a telecom box that we keep passing on our way back to the apartment: migrants welcome, no borders it says above it. I go to take a photograph on the third day, but I’m disappointed to find the box newly painted and all trace of the swallow vanished.

There are peacocks in the castle. Two males parading beneath the pines, a small crowd gathering around to marvel at their glorious tailfeathers that they open before us. Oh, and that delightful moment when we spot the godwits, their gangly legs running impossibly fast to avoid the lazy slush of tide as it covers the shallow steps of the River Tagus. There’s the sparrow that perches on the café chair beside us as we eat our breakfast, awaiting his moment. We leave some pastry specks on our table edge and he flusters and flutters anxiously around it until he braves the moment of vulnerability. There’s another unusually friendly peacock in Belém Botanical Garden (such a sanctuary after the crowds at the monastery) who circles our bench three times, cocking his extraordinary iridescent blue neck and fixing us in its bead eye. And the five swallows who loop and veer through the cool spacious air beneath us at the sundown place. Dotted through our days in Lisboa, our encounters with birds offer a salve for our dislocated souls.

Now we are home. Did we have a good time? Oh yes, we are glad we went. Have we learnt anything from our travels? Yes, that we prefer a slower form of travel, overland, and to places where we perhaps don’t need to look so hard for our more-than-human fellows. I picked a feather from the ground at the peacock’s feet and brought it home, tucked in my phone case. It has a home now in my cabinet of curiosities. Next time we travel I wonder if I’ll remember to anticipate the disorientation, the exhaustion, the dissonance. I know that I’ll remember to notice the birds.