Forever and Evora

Since my earliest travels, I developed the habit of not wanting to leave the places I visited. I can still remember the tears I shed leaving San Francisco at age 15. For years I pined for that place.

In time, I learned to move on from these travel crushes, but that doesn't mean I don't form attachments to places, sometimes so suddenly and with such a rush of feeling that I wonder if I haven't lived there in a past life.

It's happening again with Evora (pronounced EV' or ah), a walled city we've been touring the last few days. Maybe it's because I saw it first from a distance, a cathedral on a hill, or maybe it's because an hour after we landed here we were whisked away on a tour of the megaliths, which got us out into the rolling countryside where we could see the cork oaks and menhirs.

But whatever the reason, Evora has spoken to me: its medieval walls, its old folks clustering around the obituary notices in the town square, the little restaurant hunkered down beside the 16th-century aqueduct, the lovingly casual way this place embraces the past. I want to bottle Evora and take it home with me.