Tourist Traps

Most of the places my brother and I visited in Europe were extremely touristy, and we have a fair amount of experience with tourist traps in North America (the French Quarter, Gatlinburg TN [gateway to the Smokey Mountains], Quebec City, etc.), so we were led to reflect on those factors contributing to touristiness:

Cobblestone: The European tourist traps dominate. Both the small towns (Bacharach am Rhein and Rothenburg ob der Tauber) and the old sections of the big cities (Munich, Vienna, Prague) that we visited have a lot of romantically cobbly, winding streets. Quebec isn't bad, though.

Novelty Museums: Gatlinburg reigns supreme with its ultra-tacky Ripley's Believe it or Not! Museum, but Rothenburg's Medieval Torture Museum has an entertaining collection of iron maidens, stocks, and thumbscrews. (We noticed Prague also had a museum with the same theme, but one was enough for us.)

Speciality Snacks: Tourists worn down by hours of sightseeing need a sugar rush, in Europe as in America. If Gatlinburg serves up funnel cakes and the French Quarter beignets, then in Rothenburg one can get "schneeballen" (snowballs), a globular sugar-frosted pastry, and in Prague people munch on Czech spa wafers. Quebec's poutine probably isn't connected closely enough to tourism to qualify.

Kitschy Souvenir Shops: I think the American tourist traps are champs in this category, but Prague had an impressive number of T-shirt shops with classy designs like "Prague Drinking Team" or Communist-era nostalgia (Aeroflot logos, visages of Stalin). In Vienna we saw the "No Kangaroos in Austria" shirt displayed in a number of shop windows, and many Oktoberfest revellers wore shirts joking about beer consumption. The gift shops in the smaller towns were more tasteful, and I picked up a Pilsner Urquell T-shirt at the brewery's "Beer World" tourist center.

Possibly Authentic Historic Garb: No contest: Munich, with thousands of people decked out in traditional Bavarian vestments. Those Munich guys have to be pretty secure in their masculinity to wear lederhosen. In Rothenburg we joined thirty or forty other tourists for a nighttime tour of the city led by a local dressed as a medieval night watchman, with lantern, pike, and cloak. The wait staff at Pilsner Urqell's Restaurant Na Splice wore what I took to be peasant Czech smocks. I don't think I've seen costumes in many American tourist traps except for Colonial Williamsburg.

Horsedrawn Carriage Rides: I didn't see this service offered in Bacharach or Plzen, but it was everywhere else along our tour.

Tourists: It might seem trivially tautological to say that a place is touristy to the extent that it draws tourists, but it does seem to be a relevant consideration--one is getting a less authentic experience to the extent that the people around you aren't native. We saw a lot of Japanese tourists in Quebec, but Old Prague was absolutely clogged with tour groups from all over the world--we heard Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, American, Australian, British, Finnish, Norwegian, Japanese, and Chinese spoken. We were all herded like cattle through the giant St. Vitus Cathedral. Perhaps Oktoberfest might have gotten more tourists, but the ratio of tourists to natives in Prague was obviously much higher. I saw a fair number of American tourists with the same travel book that I was carrying around--Rick Steves' Germany, Austria, and Switzerland--and in fact we saw one couple both in Bacharach and in Rothenburg, suggesting that they were obviously following Rick Steves' itinerary as slavishly as we.

Elevated Viewing Areas: The American version is an elevator ride up a skyscraper or monument to a top-floor panoramic viewing area. The low-tech, lower altitude version in the European medieval tourist traps is a tiring climb up a vertiginously narrow spiral staircase in a church or castle tower. We did this in Munich, Prague, and Plzen--I couldn't convince my brother to do the one in Vienna, though. Huffing your way up hundreds of steps, you are rewarded at the top with a beautiful view of the city, not to mention polyglot graffiti.

We haven't yet developed an algorithm that weighs these various factors and ranks the cities by touristiness, but my intuitive judgment is that Prague gets the highest score.