A square that looks empty at five is not dead. It has not started. In Spain lunch is late, dinner is later, and a museum that closes for the afternoon is not a glitch in the brochure. You either eat on that clock or you eat alone in the places that stay open for people who did not.
France has its own version: a kitchen that stops, a Sunday that closes more than a northern high street, an August in which some neighbourhoods go quiet. Portugal looks small enough to rush. It is not, once you stop treating dinner as something that happens at six.
Read the clock of the place before you read the distances. A week that fights the meal times feels like a series of closed doors. A week that accepts them feels like the same city, later.
