The fish market opens before the city remembers to wake up. I found it by following a man with a cart full of crushed ice at 4:47 in the morning, my coffee still unfinished in my hand, the cobblestones slick from overnight rain.

Lisbon's Mercado do Peixe in the Mouraria quarter isn't in any guidebook I've read. The vendors call to each other in a dialect thickened by generations of the same families working the same stalls. A woman named Conceição — she told me her name without my asking, the way people do when they've decided you're worth talking to — pressed a piece of dried salted cod into my palm and said something I only half understood. But I understood her hands. Weathered, sure, moving with the memory of a thousand mornings just like this one.

The smell is the thing people warn you about and then miss desperately when they leave. Brine and cold air and something almost sweet underneath, the way the ocean smells before a storm. I stood there until my shoes were wet through and didn't care.

A teenage boy translated for me eventually, embarrassed by his own good English. Conceição had been asking whether I was hungry. Of course I was. She handed me a small plate of bacalhau à brás — shredded cod with scrambled eggs and thin fried potatoes — made on a camp stove wedged between crates. It cost nothing. She waved my coins away.

Travel teaches you that the best meals are always accidental, always shared with strangers who become, for one suspended hour, something closer than that.

I walked back uphill as the city started waking. The trams hadn't run yet. The light came in sideways and gold.

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