There is a particular panic to watching your tram leave without you, and then a particular relief when you decide not to mind. In Lisbon the famous number 28 comes often enough that missing one is less a disaster than an invitation. So I stopped chasing it and started walking uphill instead, with no plan beyond the next corner.
The city rewards this. Lisbon is built on seven hills and paved in pale limestone that throws the light straight back at you, and almost every wrong turn ends at a viewpoint — a miradouro — where someone is usually selling cold beer and someone else is playing a guitar badly and beautifully.
The best thing I saw all week was a thing I was not looking for.
It was a tiled courtyard behind a church, empty except for an old man watering geraniums, who waved me in without a word. You do not find places like that from the window of a tram. You find them by being slightly lost, slightly early, and in no particular hurry to be anywhere.
How to miss a train properly
Leave margin in the day you don’t intend to fill. Pick a direction rather than a destination. And when the tram pulls away, resist the reflex to feel you’ve failed at travel. The detour is not the thing that went wrong with the trip. Often it is the trip.
