Portugal

Portugal was one of those places I kept putting off and then couldn't believe I'd waited so long. Sintra hit me first — the Pena Palace sits up in the hills with its clashing yellows and reds and purples, the stone worn and mossy at the base, the whole thing half wrapped in cloud. It shouldn't work as a building and somehow it completely does. I walked the ramparts and kept stopping to look out over the Atlantic horizon, that pale grey light that I later learned is pretty much always there.

Lisbon was a different pace. Belém especially — I spent most of an afternoon just wandering between the Torre and the Monument to the Discoveries, both of them right on the Tagus where the river opens out before the bridge. The water that afternoon was a flat silver, the Manueline stonework almost cream-coloured against it. You can tell this was a country that once sent ships to every corner of the world; the weight of that is carved right into the buildings.

The food was the part I wasn't prepared for. A lunch near Praça do Comércio — mushroom sauce, roasted almonds, fries — and I ended up sitting there for two hours because the afternoon had nowhere more urgent to be. That's the thing about Portugal: it's easy to slow down without even deciding to.