Happy & Healthy
8 x This is how you behave like a New Yorker
The past four days I was with my beloved in my favorite city New York. We walked a sloppy eighteen kilometers every day because I just found sitting still too much of a waste of time. Well, sitting on a terrace was still okay, but even shopping I found a waste of our precious NY time. I can do that in Amsterdam too. But now I had to devour that city completely and observe everything. I had my study objects. What's in? Read here but. And how do you pass for a real New Yorker and prevent the question “Hey guys, where are you from?” from being asked after a minute?
1. Hair and nails
A New Yorker considers done hair and polished nails a must. On every street corner, there is a blow dry bar and a dusty floor with a legion of Chinese ladies who take your mani-pedi seriously. Nothing that je-ne-sais-quoi style of the French ladies. The ladies here know very well what they want and that is a done look.
2. Flat shoes
Not just sneakers, but a New Yorker walks a lot and therefore wears flat shoes. If you're not a sneaker darling, then you wear ballerinas from Charlotte Olympia with a cute cat face or a flat pair from Valentino adorned with studs, or the loafer from Gucci or my ballerinas from Miu Miu of course.
“That feminine giggle? They don't do that here”
3. Call
Look, this is where the locals are separated from the tourists. A tourist usually doesn't call that much. They are too busy posing nonchalantly while crossing a crosswalk with a yellow cab floating in the background. Moreover, international calling is expensive and you also have to deal with time differences. So if you want to behave like a local, you call. Preferably not with the phone to your ear, but with earbuds so you have your hands free for your oh-so-New York accessories like…
4. …a dog
And preferably a big one. Because a tourist doesn't take their dog along on a weekend trip that quickly. A big dog shows that you live here and that you are probably rich because you must have the space for such a gigantic specimen.
5. Wear dry cleaning
If a tourist has something cleaned, they usually do it in the hotel because you don't really know where to go. Usually, they will save their pieces to drop off at their favorite dry cleaner at home. But walking down the street nonchalantly talking on the phone with a dog leash in your left hand and your dry cleaning in your right hand and you can't go wrong.
“And if you also throw ‘you guys’ behind every random sentence”
6. Talk loud and low
If you're in SoHo, you talk as if you want them to hear you in TriBeCa. You talk loud and you laugh loud. That feminine giggle? They don't do that here. You're one of the guys or you're not. Okay…
7. Find Manhattan lame anyway
Where Parisiennes are proud of their classics and still take you to Café de Flore or Angelina, New York snobs turn up their noses at everything we like. Are you on Mercer Street? They never come. Want to shop at Victoria’s Secret? So over. Thought you were in Harlem? Haha, already passed by. So if you want to be safe as a wannabe New Yorker, find everything you secretly like incredibly ‘over’ and you're good.
8. Exaggerate
Not ‘nice’, but ‘epic’, not ‘in love’, but ‘obsessed’, not ‘well done’, but ‘amazing’. And if you also throw ‘you guys’ behind every random sentence, you can hardly go wrong as a New Yorker.
