Lost in Lisbon Without a Phone

My phone died at 11:14 in the morning on my second day in Lisbon. I know the exact time because I was staring at it when it happened, looking at a map, standing in the middle of a staircase that was also somehow a street.

The charger was back at the guesthouse. The guesthouse was somewhere in Alfama, which is the oldest part of the city, and which survived the big earthquake in 1755 mostly intact, so it still has the street plan of a place that was never planned. And I could not remember the name of the guesthouse. I'd booked it on my phone. I'd navigated to it on my phone. The only thing I remembered was a blue tile next to the door with a bird on it.

Lisbon has a lot of blue tiles. I would like that on the record.

This is the list of people who got me home.

The woman with the laundry

First I tried to do it on instinct. I went downhill, because I was pretty sure I'd come uphill, and after twenty minutes I was somehow higher than when I started. Alfama does that. Streets turn into stairs, stairs turn into somebody's front porch, the porch turns into an alley so narrow I could touch both walls, and the alley ends in a wall with a cat on it, staring at you.

A woman was hanging sheets from a window right above me, maybe close enough to hand me a clothespin. I said, "Sorry, do you speak English?" and she said, "Little," which turned out to mean "none." I mimed a bird. I pointed at a tile. I said "blue" about four times, louder each time, which is the most American thing I've ever done.

She laughed so hard she had to hold onto the windowsill. Then she pointed left, very confidently, and went back to her sheets.

Left was wrong. But I did feel better.

The kid with the football

Down a few more stairs there was a tiny square with a fountain that didn't work and a boy, maybe ten, kicking a ball against the church wall like he was mad at it. He spoke really good English, the kind kids get from YouTube. I asked if he knew a guesthouse with a blue bird tile.

He looked at me with real pity. "Everywhere has a bird," he said.

Then he asked me what I could see from my window. That stopped me. Nobody'd asked me a useful question all morning, including me. I thought about it. Roofs. Orange roofs, a lot of them, going down toward the river. And a big white church, off to the right, with a dome.

He said that was probably Santa Engrácia and that I was probably "on the other side," and pointed with the ball. Then he went back to kicking it at the wall. I gave him a euro and he looked at it like I'd insulted his mother, but he kept it.

The man at the viewpoint

The other side meant going up again. My calves would like to file a complaint. I ended up at one of the miradouros, the viewpoints, Santa Luzia, with the tiles and the bougainvillea and about forty tourists all holding their phones up at the same view.

I didn't have a phone to hold up. So I just looked at it. The river, enormous and silver. All those roofs. Laundry everywhere, like the whole neighborhood was flying flags. A tram going by underneath, yellow, packed so full people were basically hanging on by their elbows. And it hit me that I'd been in the city a day and a half and this was the first time I'd actually looked at it instead of at a screen with it on.

An old man was sitting on the bench next to me eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into a paper bag, very neatly. He watched me looking for a while. Then he said, in English, "First time without the phone?"

I said how did he know.

"Your hand," he said. He was right. My right hand kept twitching toward my pocket, like it was looking for something. He laughed and offered me some seeds.

We sat there for maybe half an hour. He didn't help me find the guesthouse. He didn't try. He told me about his wife, who used to sing fado in a bar down the hill, and how she'd been dead nine years and he still came up here every day at the same time because she liked the view. Then he got up, folded the bag of shells, put it in his jacket and said, "You will find it. Everyone finds it." And walked off.

The tram driver

I gave up on walking around two and got on the yellow tram, the 28, because I figured at least it would go somewhere. It was so full I spent the first ten minutes with my face in a German guy's backpack. When it emptied out a little I ended up near the front, and the driver, who had a mustache that I can only describe as heroic, asked where I was going.

I said I didn't know.

He nodded, like this was the most common answer he got all day, and said, "Then you are on the right tram."

He let me off near a church I recognized, white, the one with the dome, and pointed down a little side street with his chin. Didn't charge me extra for being an idiot.

The tile

It was almost five by then. My feet hurt, I'd eaten two pastéis de nata and nothing else, and I was walking down a street I was eighty percent sure I'd walked down already, when I heard someone singing. A woman's voice, low and slow, coming out of a doorway. Fado. Somebody practicing, probably, with the door open for the breeze.

I'd heard that exact voice the night before. Through my window. I'd lain there in bed listening to it and thinking, I should find out who that is.

I turned around. There was the door, green, a little chipped. And next to it, a blue tile, with a bird on it.

Honestly, it was a pretty bad drawing of a bird. Kind of looked like a potato with a beak.

I went upstairs and plugged in my phone. It took about a minute to turn on, and then all the notifications came in at once, emails, group chats, an app telling me I hadn't walked my usual steps today, which was such a lie it made me laugh out loud.

I didn't look at any of it. I opened the window and sat on the bed and listened to the woman downstairs sing until it got dark.

There's more of this kind of thing, people getting lost on purpose and by accident, over in the Wander section. And if you've got your own story about a city that made you put your phone down, I'd love to read it on Vocals Media.