My karma thankfully agreed that I experienced enough cold and rain in Sweden for the time being. Poland welcomed me with beautiful, warm weather.  I had previously visited Krakow and a few other Polish towns right across the Czech border, but this was my first time in Warsaw.

Surrounded by a language that resembles my own native language, I was in my element from the moment I left the airplane!

The city was very much alive and filled with tourists and travelers as much as locals, yet it felt peaceful for no one was in rush the way people are in a constant hurry in my current home in the U.S.

After checking in at my hostel, I started walking around to figure out my surroundings (and find the closest coffee place for emergencies). Unprepared as usual, I walked left and right as I wished, following paths that looked interesting and stopping in front of buildings that caught my eyes.

When entering the old town, one cannot miss the Royal Castle, proudly dominating the Krakowskie Przedmieście.

I walked past it straight to the very colorful and adorable Old Town Market Place with the Mermaid of Warsaw dominating the very middle of it since 2000. There are several legends about the mermaid:

The tour guides say the mermaid stopped on a riverbank near the Old Town.

Fishermen noticed something was releasing their fish and they wanted to trap the animal, but fell in love when they heard the mermaid sing. A rich merchant trapped the mermaid, but the fishermen rescued her. Since then, the mermaid with a sword and a shield has been ready to help protect the city and its residents.

Although Warsaw certainly does not feel like a big city, let alone the capital, I felt a longing for parks, greenery and some nature.

Walking away from the city center, I didn’t have to hike far to find the Royal Bath Park. On the way, I passed the Chopin Statue, where one can enjoy nature, sit and relax, but also listen to some of Chopin’s compositions.

The weather was amazing, a slight breeze was balancing out the fall sun rays, creating the most perfect temperature. With the leaves changing during this season, the park was full of colors. I got so taken away I nearly forgot I am still only steps away from the center of Warsaw.

There you have it—the city capitol with its walls and buzz and peopliness, and just a few steps away also the park with green trees and the rustling of leaves in their crowns and tranquility.

Warsaw has it all.

I grew up in a small town of approximately 10,000 people before moving out at 18. Ever since I lived mostly in cities.

Right the moment I got off the ferry, Visby reminded me of the feeling of home I have not felt in the cities I have lived in since. I felt a wave of sentiment even more once I started strolling through the streets.

Cobblestones. Little gardens. Trees and parks. The tranquility of a small town, disturbed only occasionally by cars going by through streets so narrow the vehicles are crawling more than actually driving.

I decided to follow a map that can be picked up at the Tourism Office in the middle of the city, which highlights all the World Heritage sites and puts them in an convenient numerical order, creating a nice cruise around the town, ensuring travelers see everything they should.

I started in the southwest part of the town, which led me outside of the City Wall.

I eventually crossed back inside the wall, getting to see the precise line of the old and the new—where the medieval wall meets the today’s town.

I saw old churches and ruins, sheep statues and adorable little stores, but what caught my eyes were hopscotches everywhere! As a child, I did not have the appreciation for old castles and ruins I have now, unless there was a kids program that allowed me to fight bandits to win treasure box filled with candy or a similar exciting adventure. I know I would have appreciated hopscotches along the way as a child. May that give adults more time to explore.

I finished my day at the Gotland Museum, learning about the picture stones that cannot be found anywhere else in the world, the Viking history, the Danish invasion, the reconnection of Visby back to Sweden and what life was like throughout all that time.

Elene called Visby “the Manhattan of the medieval times.”

I think I agree.

Coming from summer-hot Barcelona, I felt like the plane I boarded traveled through time and space, only to spit me out in grey, cold and rainy Sweden.

Nearly ashamed to admit, before planning this trip I had no clue where the island of Gotland was (or even that it actually was, for that matter), let alone Visby, but the more intrigued I was to visit.

Taking a bus from the airport to downtown Stockholm, from Stockholm to Nynäshamn and then taking a ferry from Nynäshamn to Visby, I got off the boat many hours later, right into the most fairytale-like fall season.

Just steps away from the pier is Visby, a Hanseatic town occupied by over 24,000 residents — with approximately 3,000 living within the enclosure of the Visby City Wall, a medieval wall protecting the heart of the town ever since the 12th century. 

I planned to right away meet with Elene, Visby’s World Heritage Site Manager, so I ran up a little hill waiting for me right at the foot of the town to check into my hostel and then ran right back down to Elene’s office, located inside the town’s tourism office right in the middle of the town.

Elene told me everything about the history of Visby, answered my endless questions and got me excited to start exploring the town.

“Visby developed as a trading post and town,” Elene said. “It was initiated by the Vikings, originally a Viking settlement. During the 12th and 13th century, Visby grew as international metropolis because there were a lot of merchants from Germany and Russia and other countries that were part of the Hansa Federation, which connected many, especially German towns. iIt was almost like a medieval EU. There are all these old merchant houses from the 12th hundreds right outside this office, which were built as warehouses for trade.”

I was also interested to know why and when the wall was built.

“The wall is actually in two parts: one that is defending the town from the sea and then there is the land part of the wall, which was built to protect the town from the rural hinterland. There were certain privileges for merchants living in town and then you had the rural area of the rest of Gotland. It was not to protect the town from the sea, but more to defend Visby from the rest of Gotland. It was a rural and urban divide.”

As Elene and I talked about the town, we were joined by Monica, Visby’s tourism specialist and strategist. 

As part of the OWHC, towns have to prove the ongoing Outstanding Universal Value and come with a plan to maintain the world heritage for future generations.

Monica and Elene work together on sustainability and integrity of tourism and heritage. Their plan involves cleaning water and water supply to address the increased amount of incoming and outgoing cruise ships, or for example electrification of transportation. 

Besides tourism, I was also interested in the immigration status of residents of the island.

Many residents living on the island nowadays are of German descendant with German last names. Gotland was temporarily taken over by the Danes in 1361 and was reunited with Sweden in 1645. The time of separation had left Danish marks in the structure of the town, although Elene admitted the Danes destroyed many churches and settlements as they were leaving.

“Very important for the city are the students at Uppsala University, which is the biggest university in Sweden, and there is a lot of international students coming here,” Monica said. “They only stay for a while because it is difficult to find a place to live here. If you get that motion of people coming and going, you get this international flair which is very important to Gotland. Otherwise it would be very easy to fall into this bubble.”

I took a walk around the town’s center with the ladies who told me about all the places I should not miss during my stay. The unknown Visby town has very quickly become unforgettable.

When I picked heritage and cultural identity as the topic for my travel blog, I only had a rough idea where this could take me.

Heritage is mostly self-explanatory, but I wanted to tie it not only to the world heritage sites, but also to explore people’s personal heritage. That’s why I threw in the cultural identity. Cultural identity is a feeling of belonging to a certain group and can be related to nationality, religion, ethnicity, social class, age group or social group that has its own distinct culture. 

Barcelona fully and unexpectedly aligned with my topic. 

From the moment I arrived to the city, I saw people all over the place wearing Catalan flags as capes and bandanas. I did not give it a second thought (living in the patriotic U.S. numbed me to the sight of flags) until the moment I was returning back to my hostel at the end of the day and found hundreds, if not thousands of them, standing around various fires put up in the middle of intersections, shouting Spanish phrases from one end to the other.

I am not here to talk politics or judge who is right and who is wrong—I am not Spanish and feel no right to do that. But I am intrigued by the fact there are Spaniards whose cultural identity does not align with the rest of the country. Catalonia was an independent country back in the day, with its own language and government, until it was forcibly attached to Spain (although given a degree of autonomy—after years of fights in an attempt to destroy Catalan autonomy).

While Catalonia is fighting for its own heritage and identity, my thoughts wander to the damages all around the city. Just from what I saw, there has been trash left behind after the protests, street fires, burned communal waste containers, bike racks torn out of the ground and cars set on fire—some of them leaving permanent marks on the city.

For a place as historical and important as Barcelona, it is confusing to see residents damaging the very city they are fighting to gain autonomy for, essentially destroying the ground underneath their own feet. This is where the people’s heritage clashes with the city’s heritage, for one is hurt and the other is about to be, but sometimes the only way forward is by letting frustration lead the way through the streets.

While Barcelona is not part of the Organization of World Heritage Cities right now, it doesn’t mean it could not become part of it in the future, for it has all necessary ingredients. 

As I mentioned earlier, my immense, endless and obsessive love for Spain did not allow me to pass on the greatest airfare deal ever seen —this time to Barcelona,  a city I have not been fortunate to visit yet.

Yet, to my initial surprise, Barcelona is not part of the Organization of World Heritage Cities (the same goes for New York, Athens or for example Madrid, just to name a few). The city checks all the boxes — Barcelona has a UNESCO site within the city limits (more than one actually) and with no problem it could prove that there is an outstanding universal value to it.

But the thing is, cities such as Barcelona are so prominent they don’t need to go through being nominated and approved,  a process which Melissa from Global Philadelphia compared to a dissertation. 

That fact, of course, makes Barcelona no less beautiful or worth visiting. Heritage-wise, Barcelona is a truly rich city, full of history, UNESCO sites and cultural significance.

Without having to think about it, my first steps led me straight to La Sagrada Familia. As impressive as all the pictures of it I have seen, the basilica towers over the city in all its magnificence. There is no such thing as simply looking at the structure and leaving. No! I couldn’t help it, I stared—at the candy-like tops, ginger-bread looking walls. I couldn’t help but think the basilica looks like a few different architects started to bring their own ideas to life and randomly met in the middle. Yet it somehow works.

From there, I decided to cross the city and climb up to the Park Güell, another of the UNESCO sites. While I knew about Barcelona’s octagon-like city structure, its full magnitude hit me only once I walked through the city, every time I had to obey it and take a detour crossing from one octagon to another. Only then I started to wonder how an old historical city has such an organized structure one more likely expects from modern cities like New York that was built that way it is built on purpose.

Barcelona did not always look like it does today. The Eixample, characterized by long straight streets, a strict grid pattern crossed by wide avenues and octagon-like blocks, was introduced by Ildefons Cerdà in early 19th century. After studying other cities, Cerdà proposed to build the Eixample in order to facilitate transport and navigation. According to Cerdà, the octagon-like detail was to provide greater air circulation in the streets, greater possibility for trams to turn corners and higher visibility around corners. The blocks are oriented in a NW-SE direction to ensure each household receives enough natural light each day. 

And so I made my way to the park, right before sunset, enjoying the view of the city, the view of an ocean of palm trees in the big city complimented by the endless blue in the background. I climbed above the park, off the path, hoping not to break any one of my bones, reminding myself I don’t have travel insurance. 

I did not have time to discover all parts of the park as the sun went down rather in a rush, leaving my surroundings nearly pitch black, only unwillingly allowing the night light of the city to disturb the darkness. 

I climbed back down the hill, back into the swarm of octagons, and without using GPS I was taking turns left and right as I wished, stopping to sit in parks, take pictures and just inhale the gratitude that I can do all of this.

A perfect day in Barcelona.