There is a specific quality to time on a train that does not exist anywhere else. The world outside moves at the pace of a landscape painting. Inside, the hours are elastic — one hour reading can feel like five minutes; five minutes staring out the window can feel like a short life.

I took the overnight from Berlin to Vienna in January. The kind of crossing that, in another era, would have felt like an event. It still does, a little. You carry a small bag, you eat a bad sandwich from a cart, you wake up at 5am to a field of snow you do not recognise, and you feel, briefly, that the world is larger than your regular life has led you to believe.

There is a particular light in Lisbon that photographers talk about the way wine people talk about terroir — you can try to describe it, but the description always falls short of the thing itself. It arrives around four in the afternoon, warm and low, and turns even the most ordinary tiles into something worth photographing.

We arrived on a Tuesday with two bags and no particular plan. By Thursday we had worn through the soles of good intentions. The city rewards wandering. The trams are slow and the hills are steep and both of these facts are gifts.

A few things we learned: eat lunch at noon (the tourists eat at two, which means the kitchens are slower and the portions somehow smaller), take the 28 tram at 7am when the light is right and the car is nearly empty, and never, under any circumstances, leave without a jar of the good fleur de sel from the market near Cais do Sodré.