I just got back from a couple of weeks in the Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary. As you might have guessed, we visited several cities that were overflowing with tourists... tourists snapping photos with phones, big SLRs and with dreaded selfie-sticks.
There is research that shows writing is much better for long term memory than typing. It has something to do with the real-time synthesis of deciding what is important enough to capture and what should be left out. As typing is much quicker to record in verbatim, whereas writing is much slower and personal. I will take this a step further and hypothesize that the same holds true for photos vs sketching. Cameras capture everything in a fraction of a second. Point (sort of), click, and there you have it. Doing a sketch, you sit down, take it in and make very conscious decisions about what to record, as you could never record every little detail... there would be no hierarchy.
There are certainly other things to say about the depth and detail of this architecture there vs the US, but for now, I just wanted to share a few sketches. From a technical perspective, most took between 3-15 minutes and were drawn with Medium Flair Pen.