I didn't have a plan for Lisbon, which in hindsight was the plan. Two weeks with a return flight booked and nothing else — no reservations past the first night, no itinerary beyond "walk toward the water and see what happens." That approach only works in a handful of cities. Lisbon turned out to be one of them.
The trams here don't just move you around, they force you to notice the city at walking pace even while you're sitting down. Tram 28 gets all the attention, and it deserves some of it, but the quieter routes through Graça and Alfama are where I ended up spending most of my week — squeezed into a wooden seat, watching laundry lines cross overhead between buildings close enough to touch.
You don't so much walk through Alfama as negotiate with it — every street eventually turns into stairs, and every set of stairs eventually turns into a view worth the argument.
The hill that broke my legs
I want to be specific about which hill, because there are several strong contenders. This one starts innocently near the Miradouro da Graça and does not stop being steep for what my legs insist was closer to a mile than the map's claimed six hundred meters. I made it up twice — once for the sunset, once the next morning out of stubbornness — and regretted the second climb by lunchtime.
What you get at the top, both times, is worth the complaint: red rooftops running downhill toward the river, the castle holding the skyline on one side, and enough bench space to sit somewhere I'd actually earned.
Eating standing up
I ate more pastéis de nata than I'm willing to put an exact number to, most of them standing at a counter because sitting down felt like it would slow me down from finding the next one. The best version I had wasn't at the famous bakery with the line down the block — it was at a corner café near Estrela with no sign I could read, run by a woman who seemed mildly amused that I kept coming back.
That's the pattern that repeated all through the trip: the version worth remembering was rarely the one on the list. It was the one three streets over, with worse lighting and a better line.
What I'd do differently
Book fewer things in advance, still. Bring better shoes for the hills — mine were fine for flat ground and a genuine liability by day four. And accept earlier that getting lost here isn't a failure of planning, it's the actual itinerary working as intended.