In the throes of pandemic wanderlust, I've been missing Prague, which is funny, because when I lived there, all I did was complain about what a stupid place it was.
What I hadn't realized, at the time, was that Prague is a great place to be miserable. It's sort of what you do there. The architecture has a beautiful, heavy regularity that confirms that you've arrived late to history. The local love language is dislike. You don't have to worry about winning anyone over because you can't. The median evening activity is getting half-drunk on something approximating wine and conferring with your melancholy thoughts as you skulk down the narrow avenues or walk the banks of the Vltava, a medium-quality river.
But I refused to be miserable, and that's why I was so unhappy in Prague. In my arrogance, I tried to impose my will upon it. I'd just left Toronto, and I attempted to live a Toronto life, which is to say that I pretended to be relevant, and searched for an excellent restaurant. But this was a ridiculous project that yielded no results.
I could've cultivated a wonderful melancholy. I could've had exquisite wintry moods. But I refused to take what Prague had to give me.
This is, now, the main thing I know about spending time in new cities. You shouldn't look for iterations of the things you liked where you came from. Instead, try to divorce yourself from your preferences, and do what a place is good at.
But that doesn't mean ‘find the best restaurants.’ Some places don't really have the best restaurants. (Prague.) Sometimes, the local delicacies are mostly comprised of spatial configurations and moods. You'll be best off if you discard even the basic shapes of your desires, and, instead, conform to the local advantages.
Unfortunately, it's not always clear what those are. Almost every city has a somewhat false reputation. The most striking example, for me, is Bangkok, where I lived for a few months. What you hear about Bangkok is all bacchanalia. But that's mostly untrue, outside of a few red light districts which are appropriately sex-focused. The city is special for a dozen reasons that are unrelated to this. You will hear about none of them from travel blogs, which are often worse than useless.
You might ask a local. But residents of a city can't always tell you what makes it special. If you live there, it's your default. Before I left Toronto, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what its singular quality is. (Extreme density of distinct neighborhoods.) My longtime New Yorker friends don't seem to understand how outrageously good the deli sandwich situation is.
It's hard to solve this, unless you can find a few intelligent travelers who are willing to be peppered with annoying questions. Another approach is agenda-free curiosity, an extremely difficult thing to cultivate. Try the Loch Kelly mindfulness question: "what is here now, when there is no problem to solve?"
I'm not claiming that every place is equivalently good once you understand it. Some places are strictly better, given your preferences. Prague's most famous artist, David Czerny, dislikes it. But he does like drinking at Mlýnská Kavárna, a tavern that now boasts a clear plastic bar he made, which is embedded with his personal effects. Looking down through the translucent bar at his empty pill bottles, you can commune with his sadness as you enjoy your own with a plate of head cheese. It's an experience that you wouldn't think to have if you were speculating about what you’re supposed to enjoy in a European city. You just have to find it and yield to it.
This post is actually about human beings.