Another Friday, another #ForTheLoveOfTravel essay. This week, Marija Icevic takes us to Vienna, a city where she’s met many versions of herself across time. It’s a quiet, introspective journey told with beauty and depth. We hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as we did.

All the weather forecasts were wrong.

It was supposed to be spring-warm, but the welcome was winter-cold. Not the first time Vienna has greeted me with this kind of surprise.

And yet, it doesn’t matter.

Because what I already knew, what never fails, is the warmth I feel here. A different kind of warmth. Not in the air, but somewhere deeper. Something that doesn’t depend on seasons or expectations.

How did I meet Vienna?

Not in the grand façades or famous attractions. It’s not the façade that stays with me, though it is undeniably stunning. Not in the symmetry of palaces or the echo of crowded museums.

I met Vienna after all of that.
On a quiet street, almost hidden from the city itself.
On a silent Sunday morning walk.

There, in that quietness, something more unfolded before me.
Not everything shows itself at first glance.
Some things hold their warmth beneath the surface – quiet, contained, almost hidden.
First impressions are only a season, never the whole story.

I truly believe that another version of me has been living in Vienna all these years – waiting. Moving through the same streets, breathing this colder air that somehow feels warmer to her.
Maybe she is the one who understands this city without trying.
Maybe she is the one who knows that warmth doesn’t announce itself.
And maybe, each time I come back, I get a little closer to her.

So I told myself: Breathe in… breathe out.

It no longer felt cold.

‘’But because just being here matters, because the things of this world, these passing things, seem to need us, to put themselves in our care somehow. Us, the most passing of all. Once for each, just once. Once and no more. And for us too, once. Never again. And yet it seems that this—to have once existed, even if only once, to have been a part of this earth—can never be taken back.’’

The Ninth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke

by Marija Icevic