In Korčula, the church bells chime the quarter hours all through the night. This is not helpful when one is unable to sleep. But tonight, other things are conspiring to keep me awake as well. The heat is one. Although I am writing this by candlelight on a small balcony at the back of the building in the cool night air (relative to the daytime temperatures, tonight’s breezeless seventy-two degrees is blissfully cool), in the bedroom I was sweating even with the sheet thrown off. Another is the painful itching from the sunburn I acquired on our first day in Stari Grad. Right now, I’m shirtless and covered in more baby powder than an unclever kid trying to be a Halloween ghoul. It seems to help the itching. The sky is beginning to lighten at the horizon, so I think I’ll have to give up on getting more than the two hours of sleep that I’ve already had tonight.

We’re staying in a third-floor bedroom in a house across the street from the bay and about 150 meters from the old town. Korčula claims to be the birthplace of Marco Polo, though of course no one knows for sure. It’s the main town on an island that has alternatively been inhabited by Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Venetians, and Croats throughout its long history. Everything is made of limestone—the streets, the buildings, everything—and is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Here, in Croatia, it seems most appropriate to clarify one lingering Czech question. When we were in Prague a few days ago, both my brother and Marcel had to endure C. and I bitching incessantly about the glut of stupid tourists being stupid and buying stupid things, posing stupidly in front of the stupidest, most uninteresting statues merely because they’re older than America, for example. I know we must have across as entirely more-expat-than-thou, but that wasn’t really the intent. It’s taken me a couple of days to put my finger on why I hate Prague, and I think I’m closer to being able to spell it out. Being a stupid tourist in Croatia has given me the necessary contrast.

Don’t get me wrong—architecturally, artistically, historically, Prague is an unparalleled place. It’s pretty much the only city in Europe that wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War. As a result, visiting the city center is a trip to another era, a living monument to a part of history that, if it exists elsewhere, has most likely been reconstructed from blueprints. But now, 15 years after the revolution in 1989, Prague is a whore, seductively displaying her wares to people who travel from all corners of the Earth to engage in this lurid fantasy. They tell Prague what they want her to be and she becomes it.

It’s not a real city anymore. The center is filled almost exclusively with shops that cater to tourists. A thousand storefronts offer you KGB tee-shirts, shot glasses, bumper stickers, shoddy mass-market folk art knockoffs, nondescript and non-specific stuff that looks vaguely Slavic. The restaurants offer you pizza or non-specific Italian or French food, and even when you are able to find something that purports to be authentic Czech food, it never includes dumplings. They don’t even appear on the menu, presumably because foreigners don’t like them. Having spent a full year in Brno, a town where few tourists have reason to go, I feel like I’ve had a decent introduction to the country and the people. I have a rough idea, albeit from my perspective as an outsider and a note-taker, of what it’s like to be Czech. Well, Moravian, more specifically, since they still differentiate; since Prague is in Bohemia, I have to make some allowances for my naivety.

One small example: For reasons I’ve been unable to determine, Czech waking hours are out of phase with the rest of the world. Many businesses there open at seven in the morning and, as a result, many people are finished with their day’s work by two or three o’clock in the afternoon. Because they are able to shop on the way home, most shops close by five or six in the evening at the latest. A special subspecies of convenience store exists for people who need to buy goods until eight in the evening. After eight, only the pubs are open, and even they close at ten or eleven o’clock, because people need to get home in time to wake up at five-thirty or six to start it all over again. The whole country are disciples of Ben Franklin’s early-to-bed-early-to-rise dictum, though I hear that it actually originated with the Austrian Emperor Rudolph II.

Prague, on the other hand, keeps party hours. Walking through the desolate and unpopulated old town at eight-thirty in the morning to meet my friend Marcel for the first time in eight years, I couldn’t figure out where all the people were. In Brno, the morning bustle would have been long over, the shops would have been open, and people would have been well into their day. In Prague, all the storefront security gates were drawn shut, exposing the work of night graffitists. Scattered early-morning dog walkers were the only other people on the streets beside me and the crews of orange-vested men and women sweeping up the debris and mopping up the puke of the foreign revelers who had been up late into the night, who had been, in fact, the only people out. The only Czechs to be found at the late-night dives amid the Black Sabbath, Joe Cocker, and Everclear blaring from the loud bars the previous night were the waitresses and bartenders.

The city has been stolen from the people who live there and has been turned into a generic, blandly international and culturally non-descript place. It is no longer Czech. I’m not even talking about the 40,000 Americans who live there, running the branch offices of international companies or wishing they could have been in Paris in the twenties. Many of the latter are unfortunate enough to have beenduped into thinking that one actually has to go to Bohemia to live that well-hyped bohemian lifestyle they’ve heard so much about. But the tourists don’t deserve all the blame. Every step of the way, Prague is right there, selling them what they want to buy, pretending to be something it’s not (or didn’t use to be). Hence the whore analogy. The tacit don’t-ask-don’t-tell deception barely conceals the real nature of the transaction. More than anything else, though, among all the wonderful experiences I had in the Czech Republic, I’m simply disappointed that the nasty summer tourist glut in Prague is one of my last memories of the place.

Well, the horseflies and mosquitoes are now taking advantage of the early morning light to annoy as many people as possible, including me, before the day’s heat oppresses them into a standstill. The swallows are flying circles overhead. It’s time to walk down and check the ferry times to Mljet island, today’s destination, half of which has been designated national forest, with a pair of lakes up in the mountains surrounded by meadows. The half moon is still visible. A seagull swoons and dives overhead. I kill a mosquito on my calf. I apply more baby powder.