Nove Mesto.
Prague has quickly gone from being Europe's little darling to an overblown tourist attraction. Now, I should qualify this statement. First, I absolutely loathe tourists who hate other tourists, i.e. the ones that go somewhere and say "it's too touristy" or "its too crowded." Um... so what are you doing there? How are you different? Were you not drawn to the place for the same reasons everybody else was? Are you not contributing to the touristiness and the crowds?
How I try to distinguish myself when I make this statement is by (at least in my opinion) approaching tourism and the tourist experience from a slightly different perspective. To me, tourists represent neutral culture. They're displaced and, more importantly, they're trying to experience something else. Imagine a city composed 100% of tourists. What would the culture be? There wouldn't be one. It would be a zero sum location. And that's the reason that I don't enjoy "very touristy" places, because with enough neutral cultural entities, the culture of the place itself slowly begins gravitating toward neutral. In other words, if there are only 100 people in a city, and there are 500 tourists visiting, the cultural neutrality of the tourists will overwhelm the extant cultural of the local population, at least from the experience of a tourist. The locals themselves would likely bunch together and continue living as they always do, and the tourists will never see them as part of their vanilla experience.
Back to Prague. It is definitely headed in the direction of cultural neutrality -- again, from a tourist's perspective. The tourism industry is so popular that the importance of catering to tourists is surpassing the importance of being Prague. This is, of course, my opinion. Prague's beauty is still easy to admire, which is what draws so many visitors, but I was a bit sad that I had a hard time finding Prague's personality.
On the Charles Bridge.
Stare Mesto.
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