After more than two months traveling I was pretty bored with the world, so I said to hell with everything and just went home to California.

Kidding. Lisbon stole our bridge.

The main reason I came to Portugal was to catch a connecting flight between Brazil and Senegal: Knowing absolutely nothing about Lisbon, I figured the name sounded nice enough and decided to spend a week there. With two months in South America behind me and six weeks in West Africa ahead, I expected Lisbon to provide a much-needed "vacation" (um ... from my vacation?) It did. I didn't expect, however, that the city would leave such an impression on me.

No one knows that Lisbon exists. After a week there, this was the only conclusion I had arrived at to explain how a city so utterly perfect has been allowed to survive in a world capable of exploding atomic bombs and commiting genocide. My first afternoon in the Bairro Alto neighborhood where I stayed, I walked around almost giddy. The hilly cobblestoned streets are lined by fruit and vegetable stores, cobblers, cornerstore cafes, butchershops, apholsterer workshops, art galleries, dance studios and vinyl shops.

Down one street I passed a jovial old man in a tweed cap who had set up a table and chair on the sidewalk outside his apartment to sit and read his newspaper. It was so picturesque that I couldn't help but smile; maybe I know too many of you New Yorkers, but I generally try to avoid walking around major cities with a big, shit-eating grin on my face, so I had to walk away from the old man as fast as I could. Half a block later I figured I was safe, but then I looked down and saw that I was standing on the tiled promenade of the "Society of Typography," which only made me smile more, so I looked away again. This time my eyes fell upon laundry hung unselfconsciously to dry in perfect geometry, so I stumbled to the next block, turned my head and saw a small yellow and black tram packed with people heading towards me down a hill while nearby, an elegantly-dressed man walked a brown and white dog that trotted alongside him carrying the man's leather wallet delicately in his mouth. At which point I gave up and grinned like an idiot.

During the day, Bairro Alto is packed with old people: men playing cards in the park, women feeding pigeons or talking with neighbors from the top half of farmhouse style front doors. During the night, Bairro Alto is packed with young people drinking, booting, talking, dancing, bar-hopping, kissing, waving broken umbrellas like band-leaders and earning the occasional yell from the old people who retake the streets when the sun comes up and the party is put on hold until next nightfall. Lisbon is a good place to be young, and a good place to be old. I can't say for sure, but it's probably a good place in which to be middle-aged, too.

And then there are the pasteis de nata: flaky puff pastry cups filled with custard and topped by a paper-thin, oven-blackened top layer, the whole thing served warm and sprinkled with powdered sugar and cinammon. The best ones in the country have been made since 1837 in the suburb of Belem, or Bethlehem. There's a huge and ornate church nearby, but I can't say it explained my daily, 25 minute pilgrimmage by train to the town. If DeBoer can claim to have seen God in his iTunes visualizer, I'm going to go ahead and say that I found Him in a pastry. I probably had to leave Lisbon for my own good.

In Lisbon the medieval streets sometimes narrow to just a few feet across; the streetlamps are cast iron and the street workers dress like the proleteriat out of a Popular Front-era film. The fire hydrants are even red. No one knows that Lisbon exists, because if we knew how to live that way, we would never choose to live otherwise.

I was starting to worry that I was going to sound like I was being paid-off by the Portuguese tourism office, so at a loss to complain about anything else, I planning to remind you that Portuguese footballers are a bunch of whiny, pretty-boy actors.

Luckily (?) on my last full day in Lisbon a dodgy-looking man in the train station followed me for awhile, then came up to me and asked, with a strong Portuguese accent, if I spoke English. "Yes," I told him. "You fuck?" I gave him the worst look I've given anyone in my life and started to walk away quickly. He ran after me and said, in a way that he seemed to think conciliatory, "No, no. I pay you." The dollar is weak, but it's not that weak.

So Lisbon is not a fairy tale after all. There are men soliciting apparent prostitutes in the train station, drug dealers on the streets at night, and a myriad of the other imperfections that make great cities great. Dead-end alleys with four black cats; crumbling, exposed brick walls; street art and graffiti on nearly every block; testaments to the fact that people actually live in Lisbon, that the city is malleable and dynamic, itself alive. Lisbon is not a fairy tale. It is something infinitely better: a city that can chip without crumbling.

Happy Spring Break. I miss you guys lots.

Love,

Fitz