[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%137%%[/mm-hide-text]
I’ve heard that you are meant to spend your gap year accepting praise for building walls for Nepalese schools. I am passing mine in an almost-entirely gentrified, frequently-romanticised metropolis, doing Bikram Yoga and learning French recreationally.
Spending part of my year living in New York City makes me something of a “tourist in residence”. I do not spend my days racing between the Statue of Liberty, Broadway shows and the seductive bright lights and flashing billboards of the grotesque Times Square, in the inexhaustible spirit of first-time tourist-warriors. But I have not yet acquired the cynicism about, or worse, the obliviousness to, the marvelousness of the city, born of the repetition and routine of a long-time resident.
Most days I find time both to gape at the gorgeous Empire State Building, and to share my photogenic, gape-worthy view with my reluctant Instagram followers, smugly proclaiming “#nofilter”. I leave the gridded avenues packed with purposeful residents weaving between visitors, to take a detour through Central Park, getting deliberately lost to justify taking shameless selfies in front of the stunning Jackie Onassis reservoir, frozen over. Entirely unabashed, I march through the magnificent local grocery stores (which, unlike the goose-bump-inducing temperatures of the airport-esque supermarkets in England, are like bite-size theme-parks for the gastronomically-inclined), collecting samples of the vintage cheddar and gazing, sometimes inadvertently drooling, at the cakes, pastries, and desserts, which I can only assume were flown in from a parisian patisserie. However, the essential thing to be savoured is not just the aged cheese, but the very fortunate opportunity I and others living abroad encounter: distanced from a world of familiarity, you are reconnected to a world of experience.
Aside from the freshness of being a foreigner, I enjoy observing the way my hosts receive me. My British accent makes me seem terribly impressive to anglophilic New Yorkers. The doorman at the building where I intern only half-jokingly charged me with espionage activity (I took this as a tremendous compliment, logically extending his accusation to generously conclude that I must bear some resemblance to a Bond girl). Even more flatteringly, it can be reliably estimated that acquaintances perceive my intelligence at a level increased by about 20% (incidentally, the expected tipping rate in New York), from my actual mental faculty, on account of my alluring British pronunciation. Amusingly but also awkwardly, when I hasten to disprove the basis of this gratuity regarding my IQ, people ask me if the same is true in England: do British people think Americans are 20% more intelligent, under the influence of their accent? I distract them by asking them if they watch Downton Abbey.
