The New York Times ran a piece today about "the moment" when newcomers to the big apple suddently realize, after a few weeks, months or even years, that they are becoming New Yorkers, sometimes against their will.
It can be an unexpected, momentous epiphany or take the form of a a series of smaller revelations, but in the end, the article argued, every newcomer experiences that moment where they feel an almost indestructible bond to the city. Sooner or later, the writer concluded, NYC metabolizes the new arrivals, who start acting like true New Yorkers: walking faster, laughing louder, arguing with waiters and generally behaving rather more assertively than they might have where they came from.
The article got me thinking about my own moment. Was there a time, I asked myself, when I suddenly realized that London, despite its perpetually cloudy summers, unhealthy drinking habits and overheated transport system, struck me as home?
I came to the conclusion that in my case there was a series of moments. And they certainly didn't happen in my first year, when disorientated half the time I fumbled my way around new neighborhoods, new friends, a new workplace but also a new home and a new marriage and found it hard to get into the groove of things. But it came anyway. The first time was when, on vacation on the Italian island of Sardinia, in the Mediterranean, I woke up to a warm, cloudless and windless day, with nothing else to do than lay on an uncrowded beach for hours with a good novel, and thought not 'I am lucky to be alive' but 'i can't believe it's the second week in a row I won't get to read my Sunday Times.'
I know. Sad.
In the months that followed I can recall many small moments and gradual changes that would now make me a stranger in my hometown, Paris, if I ever were to go back. For a while, I developed an inexplicable addiction to Starbucks' cheese and marmite --the yeasty brown stuff in a jar-- toasted sandwich. I did try to rein in my unsatiable hunger for this evil sarny, but still had it as a treat about once a week. Worse, I fantasized about it the way French women are only ever supposed to fantasize about miniature La Duree macaroons. At my desk, at 9 a.m., on the tube on my way home, in the bath before dinner.
Another moment happened during my second spring here, lulled into a false sense of optimism by a unseasonably warm summer the year before, Alessandro and I bought a portable BBQ for our balcony. Then started monitoring the weather forecast the way the FBI keeps tabs on the health of a U.S. president.
Since then, my condition has irremediably worsened. I now queue at the bus stop (behavior unheard of among French citizens), buy silly cards to accompany birthday gifts, eat root vegetables from struggling UK farms, carry a foldeable umbrella everywhere I go and say 'fab' and 'lovely' to everything. I put my luggage in the boot, complain when my plans go pear shaped and take out the rubbish.
Still I'll never forget my four years in NYC. Those were awsome.
1 comment:
Talking of queuing at bus stops...
do you remember the last day of the Chinese Olympics when London got a few minutes to give a taster of what was in store for the world when they tuned in to London 2012? In the piece laid on by the British, a dancing crowd of people at a bus stop were brought on and then and a red London bus stopped outside it. The dancers then piled in "every man/woman for themselves" jumping on top of each other style. Strange, I thought. Just about everything in Britain has changed since the fifties (so I'm told) EXCEPT queuing at bus stops. An odd thing to use as a representation of 2012 Britain.
Then I heard a Chinese commentator say it was a disgraceful scene "Bad things like that happen in China but we would NEVER show it to others, very disrespectful". A cultural difference I suppose.
Personally, I'd queue at the Post Office to get a stamp to complain about the long queues at the Post Office.
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