The summer before I turned 25, I quit my job, packed my things, and moved from Edmonton, Canada, to New York City, a glittering metropolis I’d never been to, and one where I knew absolutely nobody. Like so many generations of young immigrants before me, I arrived in New York with nothing but a dream, a few meager possessions, and $20 in my pocket.

I also had a scholarship to a graduate program at Columbia University, a six-figure student loan and an exact plan for what I would be doing with the next two years of my life, but that kind of spoils the narrative I’m trying to create here.

The shores of Ellis Island, this is not.

Before moving, I spent a lot of time reading up on ways to blend in with native New Yorkers, in the hope that I could avoid looking like a lost Canadian tourist in need of directions to the nearest Tim Hortons. I knew that driving down Fifth Avenue on a Zamboni with a hockey stick in each hand was probably out of the question, but I wanted more than just “not being obviously foreign”. I wanted to be able to trick jaded Manhattanites into thinking I was born and raised in the back of a pizza shop the Lower East Side.

This is not blending.

For the most part, the advice I found online was good, but quite basic – advice like “don’t ask where you can buy subway tokens”, “don’t wear a fanny pack in public” and “don’t ask if every tall building you see is the Empire State Building” will only get you so far. My journey from “overwhelmed foreigner” to “overwhelmed foreigner with a favourite bodega” has been a long one with many bumps along the way, but it’s taught me several nuggets of wisdom that I would like to pass on to other naive wannabe-New Yorkers who intend to follow in my footsteps.

Pictured: the Empire State Building, according to confused tourists.

So if you’re thinking of uprooting your entire life to pay triple your current rent in New York and you want to blend in seamlessly with the locals, here are my personal tips:

Show no visible reaction to anything that happens in front of you.

Three weeks after moving to New York, I was taking the uptown 6 train from Union Square at midnight when a disheveled and mostly-naked man boarded the car. He announced to the assembled passengers at large that he liked to have sex with women, because he was not gay. He then sat down next to a random woman who was reading a book on the train, and screamed directly in her ear that he did not have sex with men, because only gay men have sex with men, and, as you’ll recall, he was definitely not gay. And without even glancing up from her book, the woman reached into her pocket, handed the man a dollar, and quietly turned the page.

I knew right then and there that I was witnessing a true New Yorker in action, and I aspired to give as few fucks as she did.

This woman is my goddamn hero.

As a New Yorker, it is essential that you go about your life completely indifferent to the chaos unfolding around you. Doomsday cult member ranting in the park? No reaction. Rat the size of a beaver leaping out of a garbage can? No reaction. Man in a crotchless cactus costume helicoptering his penis on a crowded N train while singing the Star Spangled Banner? No. Goddamn. Reaction. From now on, the only thing you feel is “quiet exasperation”, and your only facial expression is the face you make right before you roll your eyes.

I hate myself for drawing this. 

The goods news, however, is that even if you begin your time in New York as a regular person who experiences proportionate emotional responses to upsetting stimuli, the very act of living in NYC will soon make you just as dead inside as the rest of us. You can only witness so many public break-ups, fist-fights and instances of grown men in children’s bathing suits playing xylophone solos in the park before your brain’s emotional circuitry decides to take a vacation until you’ve moved somewhere more sensible.

Care deeply about the way that strangers eat their food.

When you Google advice about how to blend in in The Big Apple, nestled somewhere between “don’t pronounce Houston Street like it’s a city in Texas” and “don’t call it The Big Apple”, there is usually a list of the particular ways that New Yorkers like to eat their food. They tell you that pizza should be folded, bagels should be kept far away from novelty flavoured cream cheeses, cronuts should be fed only to tourists, hot dogs should be eaten with mustard, and dinner should be delivered straight to your apartment door, no matter how close you live to the restaurant.

What they don’t tell you is that these food rules are sacred, and as a New Yorker, you have a sworn duty to uphold them.

As a New Yorker, you could witness a man dressed as knockoff Big Bird beat a knockoff Elmo to death with a rubber chicken and a copy of The Village Voice in the middle of Times Square without batting an eyelash. That’s a minimum expectation. But if you happen to see someone putting ketchup on a hot dog within your line of sight, you are well within your rights to lose your goddamn shit.

Man, I really made myself draw some weird shit for this post.

Usually, New Yorkers live by the sacred code of “if it doesn’t directly affect me or interfere with subway service, it’s not my problem”, but food seems to be the one big exception. New York’s incredible food scene is one of the only things that makes it worthwhile for us to spend 18 hours per week commuting to work in each other’s armpits on crowded trains, and we will defend it to our incredibly sweaty deaths. When you eat a chopped cheese with a fork, you aren’t just spearing bits of meat and lettuce. You’re driving the tines of that fork right into our collective hearts.

Give people the street address of everything you do, and the exact transit route you took to get there. 

If you’re a New Yorker, you didn’t “go to a bar downtown” last night. You didn’t “get drinks near Grand Central Station and then go for food afterwards”. You took the downtown 6 train to the Karizma Lounge on 51st between 2nd and 3rd avenue, and then you walked to Sean’s Bar and Kitchen on W 48th street by the Rockefeller Center, but you got hungry and the kitchen was closed, so you caught the uptown F train, transferred to the Q and got late-night French toast at Gracie’s Corner Diner on the corner of E 86th and 2nd before stumbling your drunk ass home. And that’s exactly how you’re going to tell your friends about it.

Those are all very real places, by the way, and you’re welcome for the awesome night out.

You might think that New Yorkers go into such vivid details about their activities and relevant cross-streets because they expect other people to be familiar with the establishments they visited, and they are trying to ground the conversation in mutually recognized landmarks. You would be wrong. NYC is home to so many bars, restaurants, food trucks, pop-up eateries, pubs, lounges and mysterious storm drains that dispense food if you drop $5 between the bars that it’s nearly impossible for one person to have a general working knowledge of even a fraction of the city’s establishments. My friends could tell me that they ate a restaurant in the middle of the West Side Highway that serves nothing but hot contact lens solution, and my only response would be “Yeah, I think I remember hearing about that on Twitter”.

Opti-Free No-Rub with Enhanced Comfort satisfies and refreshes, right up until the moment you die of saline poisoning.

You might also assume that New Yorkers give you detailed directions so that you can envision their route through the city, and retrace their steps if you decide that that all-Mime bar they went to last night sounds like a rockin’ good time. This might make sense in Manhattan; the island is set up more or less on a grid system, and once you’ve memorized a handful of the nonsense avenue names, you can basically pinpoint any spot on the map. That can’t be the explanation either, however, as people still do this when they’re talking about fun things they did in Queens and Brooklyn, which are set up on a funhouse mirror version of a grid system that shrunk in the wash.

Staten Island and The Bronx are also set up on a warped, hard-to-navigate grid system, but they never come up in these conversations because no one has ever had fun in either of these boroughs.

Above: an approximate map of Brooklyn.

Ultimately, I have been forced to conclude that this whole display is some sort of posturing, where New Yorkers prove their own encyclopedic knowledge of overpriced bars and B-grade restaurants. It’s also a chance to size each other up, and make sure that they’re speaking to a real New Yorker and not a poser who forgot that the W train doesn’t run on Saturdays.

Stay within a three-block radius of your apartment as often as you can. 

In the movies and on television shows, people think nothing of zipping all over New York City at a moment’s notice. On TV, it’s completely reasonable to go for brunch in Chelsea, spend the afternoon at the Met, take a scenic evening walk in DUMBO, grab dinner in Little Italy, go to a bar in Alphabet City, and hit up a party in Gravesend before heading back to your Williamsburg apartment, all in the same day; this is presented as if it’s a realistic slate of activities for the average New Yorker, and not an exhausting and joyless slog through multiple hellscapes of transit and tourists.

In reality, if we’re on the Upper West Side and you casually suggest that we head over to a warehouse party in Bushwick, I will hold you beneath the surface of the Hudson River until I stop seeing bubbles.

The Met: come for the art, stay because your feet hurt too bad to leave.

When I first moved to East Harlem, I made a naive promise to myself that I would spend every spare moment exploring absolutely every inch of the city. I told myself that I would think absolutely nothing of adventures in the outer boroughs, or even excursions beyond the city on the Metro North train. Two years later, I regard anything that takes me below 96th street the way NASA regards a manned mission to Mars.

This afternoon doesn’t work for me. Check back in 2025.

New Yorkers have access to one of the most vibrant, incredible cities on Earth, and most of us spend our time trying to see as little of it as possible. When friends visit from out of town, I will happily usher them through Chelsea Market and across the Brooklyn Bridge like I’m Aladdin taking them on a magic Metro Card ride, but apart from that, the idea of getting on the 6 train for reasons other than my continued employment and immediate financial survival is about as appealing as the idea of hurling myself into the Atlantic Ocean and swimming back to Canada. If grocery stores within a three-block radius don’t carry a particular item, I don’t need to eat it, and if one of my Manhattan friends moves to Brooklyn, in all likelihood, I will never see them again.

Be highly offended by anyone even suggesting that you move away from this godforsaken city.

New York City is overpriced, undersized, and almost hilariously overcrowded. The average apartment is a refrigerator box in the corner of someone else’s kitchen, and it costs more than the rent on a four-bedroom house in Iowa. Every inch of the city smells like old hot dog water. The only delis you can safely eat from either charge $23 for a sandwich or are staffed mostly by feral cats. The subway system is run by rats, road repairs are handled by pigeons, and the urban planning is done by former SNL cast members who can’t land movie deals. At any given moment, 2/3rds of New Yorkers are one MTA delay away from resorting to cannibalism.

And if you even suggest that I move somewhere else, I will flay you alive with a stale pizza crust.

Living in New York City is like having Stockholm Syndrome for a captor who didn’t actually kidnap you, and would honestly prefer that you leave. You sort of quietly chained yourself up in his basement one day when he was out watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and now you just stay down there and insist that you’re in love with him, no matter how many cockroaches he unleashes on you or how often he hints that he would like you to clear out so he can turn the basement into luxury condos.

Living in NYC means that I will probably never own a house, never own a car, and never go a full 24 hours without accidentally touching a stranger’s butt ever again. Unless I purposely make plans to travel out of the city, I will never look up and see a night sky full of stars, or the Northern Lights that were such a constant presence in my Northern Canadian childhood. The noise of the subway will make me deaf, the constant odor of stale urine will make me nose-blind, and the act of living shoulder-to-shoulder with 8 million people will eliminate any sense of shame I once had that motivated me to act like a civilized, house-broken person in public. I will have to have my consciousness transferred into a new body in 2080, because I will never be able to retire.

And I did not choose a profession that lends itself well to robots.

But despite all these things, I love New York City and its people, and I will continue trying to blend in with its people until I die, get deported, or I eat too much Veselka cheesecake and the rats finally take me. Whichever comes first.

***

For more helpful tips on not dying in the United States, please enjoy this post about the time I found it quite necessary to be hopelessly inebriated on a Delta flight on Christmas Day.

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