In general, this is a very pleasant place to visit -- despite the niceness, there's also some deeply rooted ethics of hospitality. (One doesn't often get the Kirk Douglas kebab, thanks to local vigilance.) You can learn a lot from the micro-gestures of the locals in public. One picks up subtle clues from the way the older women stand at the check-out counter, or shift positions when a stranger arrives on a path or to a bench. I've muttered to myself on more than one occasion on the morning run in past visits, particularly in winter, that in NYC, people use sidewalks for getting from place to place, but in this part of the world people use sidewalks for fighting over the sidewalk.
But this has to do with the nature of the society. When I stand aside to let someone pass on a narrow path, they might understand it as a meaningful gesture of deference and courtesy (one that at one time might have been legally compelled, as such things were in the deep South of America not long ago). The visitor from abroad, however, sees it as a logical thing to do for two people on a crowded sidewalk. The meaning for the visitor is different. The one who sees the meaning as courtesy and deference makes the encounter more meaningful to them by enacting their role in the action of courtesy and deference, while the person who sees the meaning as being in efficiency usually expects the other to at least lean a bit to the other direction in reciprocal efficiency, and thereby make the encounter more meaningful. As a result, there's sometimes a slight bump or a grazing of clothing. (Which is where the mutual ethics of courtesy and hospitality come in, and it remains just a small stumble, and perhaps revelatory for all involved.)
The uniqueness of this city is that it preserves the strata of pre-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment as living realities. All are necessary to some degree, as those cities composed entirely of the avant-garde are coming to understand. But this makes the reciprocal obligations of genuine hospitality and genuine courtesy essential. (As for those only capable of niceness, they're generally well-off enough to afford an insulated vacation in which everyone around them is being paid rather well.)
The capital city of the last country I visited is unique in preserving the Roman and pre-Roman ruins as sites to be walked through beneath the 19th c. & modern office buildings, in addition to the subway stations. That same stratified reality can also be present socially within a culture, but only when each of the levels is in fact a living reality, sometimes lightly bumping into the others, but carried along by genuine interest and care.