Get dripped on from above—and hope it’s water from an AC
You’re walking through midtown on a cloudless 80 degree day, when suddenly—splat—a drop of something lukewarm and wet pelts you from above. Did some sicko on the 17th floor just spit, or worse, take a leak? In your head, you know that the trickle is most likely residue from one of the countless air conditioners dangling on high. Still, your first New York baptism is rather disturbing.

Claim a favorite spot in Central Park that doesn’t include the word sheep, lawn, meadow or Bethesda
We don’t settle for the East Meadow, Strawberry Fields or—please—the Great Lawn. The beauty of Central Park is that there’s so much of it; there’s no need to gather at the obvious spots. Venture beyond the cliché nooks and crowded avenues featured in romantic comedies, and seek out the paths less traveled. A good place to start is the underappreciated North End. The Ravine (between 102nd and 106th Streets) has five waterfalls and is one of the park’s best niches for bird-watching.

Get flashed by a perv
It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. Sooner or later, some guy is going to flash his cookies in your face. It’s doubtful that outrage, embarrassment or even amusement will be your first reaction. In fact, you’ll probably be more annoyed than anything else. And since New Yorkers always have somewhere they need to be, this obstruction—even if it is a naked stranger with more hair below than on top—is barely going to slow us down.

Have an up-close and personal experience with a water-bug or rat
Someday soon you’ll dig around the back of your closet for that pair of shoes you haven’t worn in months, and one of them will hold a big, shiny, multiappendaged roach that jumps out and runs up your arm. Or you will walk too close to a pile of garbage on the Bowery and about a half dozen mangy, furry beasts will leap out of it and scurry over your feet. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Compulsively point out locations as you watch Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen movies
As we sprint around town, we scarcely glance at the surrounding cityscape. Yet show us a movie that was shot here and w rattle off intersections and landmarks like an overcaffeinated tour guide. In Mean Streets, we’re not ogling the young Bobby D, we’re yelling, “My friend had a sublet two doors down on Mott Street.” As we’re watching Manhattan, we’re not savoring the scene in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sit and gaze at the Queensboro Bridge, we’re explaining to the people next to us, “That’s Riverview Terrace at 58th Street.” Of course, they already know this and are too busy IDing the next location to hear you.

Be able to cite a favorite Chinese restaurant on Mott Street
Once you’re over the goof of eating at a restaurant called Hung Fat and the purely economic motive for trying Double Hey, you come to appreciate Wo Hop, better known as 17 Mott Street. It’s not just that you can find great lo mein at 3am; it’s that you could return to Wo Hop any evening to find the reliable place just as it appeared last night—filled with slumming uptowners, a rock band after a pay-to-play gig and stoners from Bayside High, all struggling with chopsticks amid the weirdly dim fluorescence. Some things never change.

Buy a pair of socks at a street fair
Some people love the jumble of sights, sounds and smells at New York City street fairs. The more jaded, however, know there’s only one reason to push past the gnarly Italian sausages, Asian massage torture and T-Mobile hawkers: socks. At an average of four dollars for a bundle of three pairs—or three bundles for ten bucks—it’s the city’s most cost-effective way to rotate mangy hosiery out of your drawers at least once a year.

Incorporate a lexicon of Yiddish terms into your vocabulary
Even if you grew up in Reykjavik, after a certain time here, oy, schlemiel and mazel tov are going to roll off your tongue as easily as bagels and lox roll onto it. Bubkes, you say. But you won’t be able to help it. Yiddish has some of the best words to describe urban living: like the box you had to schlep up six flights; the schlocky work the cobbler did on your backpack strap; or the tchotchkes your roommate is crowding your tiny dorm room with. Your remaining task is to order a schmear.

Photo by iStockPhoto

Indulge in a classic pastrami on rye

It’s strange to think of cured, garlicky beef as being so alluring, but pastrami has inspired more field-trips-with-a-mission in New York than the public-school system. Slice the
big-name midtown delis off your list: Stick with Katz’s (205 E Houston St) for the Old World connection; Ben’s Kosher Deli (209 W 38th St), where finicky garmentos go; or Pastrami Queen (1269 Lexington Ave), which used to be Pastrami King when it was in Queens. Go figure.

Surreptitiously “steal” a cab without other people realizing what you’re doing
Stealing a taxi is not robbery in the traditional sense. It’s more like cutting in an invisible, albeit commonly recognized, line: a minor moral slip, at worst. As such, there is no punishment impeding the guilty pleasure of slyly wedging oneself between an incoming cab and a gaggle of drunken travelers—arms raised in desperate taxi salutes—and speeding off before they realize that their transportation has just been, for lack of a better term, stolen.

Spend some quality time with E.B. White’s Here Is New York
In 1948, E.B. White spent a heat-blasted July weekend in New York and produced this dazzling mash note to the city he had all but abandoned for Maine. By the time the Holiday magazine article was turned into a book the following year, several of White’s monuments had already disappeared. And though many more have since vanished, this little volume remains a touchstone for new arrivals, each of whom, as White writes, “absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer….” White traces the miracles of urban interaction, the joy of discovering Gotham’s eternal beauties and—in the chillingly prescient sentence—the city’s potential for tragedy: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island’s fantasy….”

Eat last night’s take-out for breakfast…and lunch
Lazy and/or cheap bastards all around the world will squeeze every last ounce out of leftovers, turning a single order of General Tso’s chicken into a weekend’s worth of sustenance, but few wear their take-out savvy as proudly as we do. Any amateur can make a third-day feast of hardened white rice; it takes New York chutzpah to go back to the restaurant and request a few free mustard packets to zing it up.

HOT TOPIC: Pizza
• Wolf down a guilt-free slice at 2am.
• Pledge your allegiance to just one of the classic three recipes: Lombardi’s, John’s or Grimaldi’s. And be able to convince other pie eaters they’re wrong about their preferences.
• Burn the roof of your mouth on a scalding-hot slice even though you knew you should have waited at least 30 more seconds to eat it.
• Know how to fold your pizza just right in order to munch on it while striding down the street, without the tip hanging down and dripping grease on your shirt.

Know where the Vermeers are in the Met
New Yorkers love to brag about their Vermeers, and why not? We’ve got eight—count ’em, eight!—canvases by the 17th-century Dutch master, whose existing work totals only thirtysomething pieces. That’s more than anyone else in the world! Okay, we in this case means chiefly the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has five, but it’s the same difference. Anytime you want (well, Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday, 9:30am–5:30pm, and Friday and Saturday 9:30am–9pm), you can drop in and savor, say, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (circa 1660). So take that, Las “fastest growing city in America” Vegas! That is, until you build a fake Met to stick your fake Vermeers in.

Know where the city’s only national park is... and visit it
“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes.” Some might think Frank O’Hara’s words a relic of an era that’s been bulldozed and paved and excavated to death, but we know better—we’ve been to Gateway National Recreation Area. The city’s only national park actually touches three boroughs (and a bit of New Jersey); you can climb the cannons at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, eavesdrop on warblers at Queens’ Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge or wriggle your toes in the sand at Brooklyn’s Plumb Beach.

Strip to your underwear to try on discounted clothes in the middle of Century 21
There are few places in the city where peeling your clothes off in public—while sober—doesn’t so much as raise a brow. At legendary discount department store Century 21, it’s practically a ritual, as even the most demure shoppers have been known to drop trou in the service of a high-fashion bargain, despite the presence of 31 dressing rooms. Hey, we’d do cartwheels down Cortlandt Street naked for a $100 Narciso Rodriguez dress.

Carry on a conversation with a cabbie without understanding a word he says
Maybe the traffic is loud. Maybe that partition is muffling the sound. Maybe your driver is speaking a jumbled mix of broken English and Urdu that might be described as Urd-ish. But sometime during your ride with Chatty Chalabi, you realize he’s been talking for ten minutes and you have no idea what he’s saying. What to do besides nod sincerely and try to interject “yes” at the right times? And tip well.

Stay home on Friday and Saturday nights because they’re for amateurs
Who likes to wait in line? Apparently, people from New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut and other wild, uncharted territories. They show up by the SUV-load on weekends, done up in their finest Big City gear, and wait for a turn to pile into packed theaters, overflowing restaurants and elbow-to-elbow bars. You, meanwhile, have scheduled your quality entertainment and social engagements for midweek; then you can kick back and watch videos while the unwashed take over the town for 48 hours.

Order what the people sitting at the next table in the Chinese restaurant are having—without knowing what it is
Maybe it comes from stubborn resistance when the waiter wags his finger at you and says, as you point to the large family party at the next table, “No no, that not for you.” Maybe it’s just a gonzo urge, but you’ll never try chicken feet, duck-blood cubes or fried whelk (don’t ask!) otherwise.

Buy an umbrella that’s just gone up in price to $10, and then leave it in a cab
It’s rush hour, it’s pouring, and you forgot your blasted umbrella in your 14th floor dorm room. You bravely head onto the street, where people are recklessly jabbing their oversized bumbershoots into your eyeballs. An opportunistic street vendorspots your suffering and offers you shelter—for a preposterous $10. In desperation, you pull out a soggy bill. Several avenues later, you rejoice in finding an empty cab and settle in. Destination reached, you pay the driver, your cell phone rings, you step out, he drives off, it’s still raining—and where is that umbrella?

Give a car a good kick after it nearly runs you down at a busy intersection
New York’s pedestrians deserve respect: We don’t pollute the atmosphere and we aren’t plastered in faux-patriotic decals. So when that cab or obnoxious Chevy Tahoe impatiently noses into our path on a right-hand turn and risks reducing us to crosswalkroadkill, it’s our solemn right to give him the glare of death, and maybe issue forth with a hearty kick to the right fender. He’s piloting a three-ton carnage machine, we’re wearing Keds—this walk signal is our moment to shine.

Photo by iStockPhoto

Adopt a piece of furniture you found on the street
Forget the big chain stores—we know how to outfit our digs by carting home castaways. It’s amazing what you can find on the concrete if you keep your eyes peeled. Mint-condition bureaus, tables, desks and chairs are there for the taking if you’re willing to do a bit of lugging.

Say to somebody, without irony, “whaddayagonnado?”
This is our version of “I feel your pain.” In the Midwest, they say, “What can you do?” But that seems a little passive to us. We like to think we can control things. Asking what someone is going to do implies we have the power to change the situation—although at the same time we’re saying, “Hey, we’re not actually going to get involved with your problems.”

Eat a street vendor’s hot dog, while walking, in under a minute
Every year on July 4, Nathan’s Famous has a hot-dog-eating contest in Brooklyn at the original Coney Island branch. New Yorkers also conduct their own hot-dog-eatingcontests every day. The ritual: Harried and rushed, the starving sausage sleuth spots a Sabrett stand, tells the vendor what goop to shovel onto the wiener—mustard and sauerkraut, of course—and shells out a couple bucks for the privilege. Four bites later, the thing is gone, and chances are you’re not more than 20 feet from where you started—it’s a feat usually accomplished in a literal New York minute.

HOT TOPIC: Subway
• Devise a subway escape plan. For instance, in case you ever happen to drop your wallet onto the tracks, you’ve already gauged how much time it would take to jump down and get back up before a train will arrive. You’ve envisioned a similar strategy in case a crazy guy pushes you.
• Fall asleep on the subway and miss your stop (bonus points if your wallet gets taken during your nap).
• Know exactly which car to get on based on where the turnstiles are at your destination stop.
• Go to school late today hoping to catch another glimpse of that beautiful stranger you saw on the train yesterday when you went late.
• Develop the “I’m invisible, you’re not going to talk to me” subway bubble, which wards off musicians, panhandlers and battery salesmen.

Have your coffee-cart guy ask where you’ve been when you’ve been away
You thought that living in a city of 8 million would offer you a measure of anonymity. You were wrong. You can avoid your best friend, your advisor and your mom, but you always have to face the coffee guy. He’s the closest caffeine source, and he doesn’t just know that you take it light, no sugar, flat top. He knows when you skip the gym, he knows when you play hooky, he even knows when you get some nooky—“Uh, I need another, regular.”

Feel a sense of loss if you don’t see your corner’s regular homeless person for a few weeks
It seems unlikely that the homeless go on vacation, so you can’t help but feel a vague sense of dread when your block’s resident beggar goes AWOL. Is he in jail? In a hospital? Dead? Besieged by guilt, you suddenly rue the times you didn’t give him a nickel for his wobbly serenades of Leo Sayer’s “When I Need You,” and you swear that if you ever see him again, you’ll...oh, there he is, pooping on a squirrel. Never mind.

Fight for a bargain at the Barneys warehouse sale
The famous warehouse sale at Barneys isn’t just some inventory-purging event; it’s a 30-year-old institution that attracts 80,000 or so hunter-gatherers twice a year to sift through 14,000 square feet of bins and racks of sweaters, pants, shirts, shoes, suits and accessories. The experience can be brutal: Bargain shoppers endure oppressive heat, swelling crowds and long lines, all in the hope of finding designer duds for dirt cheap. And we mean cheap: Merchandise comes to the sale marked down 75 percent, and then, after two weeks, select items are marked down another 20 to 40 percent. Wear elbow pads.

Hold those bridge-and-tunnel kids in contempt…especially if you used to be one

Sit next to a celebrity at a bar/restaurant and not care
It’s not difficult to find celebrities in Manhattan, particularly if you consider the ubiquitous Moby, David Bowie, Regis Philbin and Laurie Anderson to be among the noteworthy. But sitting next to Harrison Ford or Halle Berry at dinner and really not giving a damn is something only the genuinely jaded can pull off. If you’re just trying to look like you don’t care, you’ve got years to go.

Hold those bridge-and-tunnel kids in contempt…especially if you used to be one

Take a Jewish holiday off—even if you’re not Jewish

While Christian holidays usually occur on Sundays and Muslim holidays can last a month, Jewish holidays often fall on weekdays. All the better reason to miss work. And the convenient sundown start time makes them all the better reason to cut out early. So what if you’re not Jewish? Who cares if you have no idea what Purim is or can’t pronounce Yom Kippur? In these overly sensitive and PC times, what professor would dare question your convictions?

Drink an egg cream…and know what’s in one

Some say in the beginning, egg whites were added to make it frothier; others say the original syrup was made with eggs. But the traditional version of the egg cream, which was created in NYC about a century ago, has nary an ovum in sight. Instead, this fizz job is whipped up with ice-cold milk, old-fashioned seltzer and chocolate syrup. Diehards debate where the drink was first served (Lower East Side or Brooklyn?) and in what order to add the ingredients (syrup first or last?), but there’s one thing they can all agree on: The only chocolate syrup worth this potable’s rich history is Fox’s U-bet. None other will do.

Push your groceries in one of those old-lady carts
We’re trained to be urban survivalists, capable of handling almost any errand without a car. Ideally, we wouldn’t need any wheels at all, but sometimes the soda and laundry soap are just too heavy, and we’re reduced to pushing groceries home in one of those fold-up carts, the kind that double as walkers for old ladies. Even worse, we have to push the empty cart to the store.

Get blocked from your dorm by a film or TV crew
It’s been a long day; you can’t wait to crawl into bed. But lo and behold, in your absence, the entire block has been taken over by a film crew. Worse, they’re doing the scene in the building next to yours because some freelance something-or-other neighbor lusted after the location fee. So now you’re stuck having to navigate thick electrical cables snaking across the sidewalk, and to endure unnaturally bright movie lights slicing through your window. Plus, some jerk-off in a headset and Elephant T-shirt is asking you who you are and what you’re doing there. Well, tell ’em to piss off—or at least, demand a cinnamon bun from the craft-services table for your trouble.

Make a joke about all the kitchens on East 6th Street’s Indian Row being connected

Roll your eyes whenever someone makes that joke about the kitchens on East 6th Street

Try to drag something way too big home on the bus from Ikea
The $99 delivery fee defeats the whole purpose of buying flimsy furniture at Ikea.So unless you’re one of those exotic urban creatures who own a car, your only shot at getting your new Billy bookcase home cheaply is to shove it onto the Ikea shuttle bus, then into the subway at Port Authority.

Be approached by a junkie on a bicycle pretending to be a PA on a commercial shoot who has no money to get to work—and be impressed enough with his hustle that you don’t mind forking over five bucks.

Tell a cabbie how to get there
Once upon a time, cabbies were grizzled Americans who prided themselves on knowing every square inch of the city. Not anymore. Today, you’re lucky if they know what neighborhood you’re talking about when you request an address. Savvy Gothamites can point out which routes are fastest, what alternative routes are advisable in the event of traffic jams and which river crossings are the least congested. In an ideal world, the cabbie would tip you.

Feel a great sense of relief when your plane flies into JFK or La Guardia
Take us off our turf for more than, say, a week and we start to jones for the urban homestead. So when your return flight begins its descent and you catch a glimpse of that familiar skyline through the airplane window, a wave of relief washes over you. It’s like coming in from the cold after playing in the snow for too long. Sure, it was fun to be outside. But there’s no place like home.

Get Hit by a bicycle messenger or get “doored” on your bike
Look left. Look right. Step cautiously off the curb and—wham! In this city, bike messengers choose their own paths. Makes you think you could rule the streets when you get on a bike yourself, but it’s not like bikers have it made, of course. We dodge death every time we start pedaling; reckless car passengers are ready to blindly throw open their doors at just the right time, sending innocent cyclists (are you wearing your helmet?) bouncing off the pavement. So pick your biking mishap. Either way, it’s going to be painful.

Make a plan to meet your friends at 2am
After Conan signs off, most good folks brush, floss and drift off into cozy dreamland. To many of us, though, the night is but a toddler—still young and promising and full of the potential to cause irreparable damage. Whether it be an illicitly smoky speakeasy, an after-hours loft party or merely hanging by the waterfront, New Yorkers know that while good times don’t necessarily start when the sun goes down, they should be rolling by the time it comes up again. Take advantage:You can’t do this in many other towns.

Doze through car alarms,sirens and drunks shouting in the street—and have a hard time sleeping without them
It can wear you down, the noise of the city. When you first move in, the nightly aural assault fries your nerves, keeping you up till all hours. But somehow—probably in some flicker of a second when, in the name of sanity, you were forcing yourself to not pay attention—the relentless car alarm outside your window morphed from a soul-killing screech into a reassuring lullaby. The wailing sirens of gridlocked ambulances and the lilting voices of loitering frat boys added their own harmonies. Now if the cacophony is absent as you’re drifting off to nodville, you’re just as unsettled as you used to be when you first heard it.

Go to the Bronx for something other than a baseball game
Many Manhattanites are under the impression that the only Bronx activity that can’t be replicated on their isle is a Yankees game, but Manhattan’s zoo is tiny, its Little Italy is a tourist trap, and its parks are crawling with too many people. A quick trip to the north reveals that many things (parks) are bigger, and some (linguine) are better, in the city’s only mainland borough. And it’s a lot closer than you think.

Photograph by J. Maher © WCS

Navigate the West Village without a map
Many areas of the city can be confounding, but few are as romantically, stubbornly haphazard as the West Village, which was exempt when the grid was laid down in 1811. Abandon sidewalk logic, ye who enter here. Waverly meets itself? Of course. Greenwich Street and Greenwich Avenue? Yes, to the dismay of many a delivery guy. But at some point, perhaps after passing Manhattan’s narrowest house six times while looking for Commerce Street, your inner Village compass will snap to, and the landmarks will stop playing hide-and-seek. From then on, you’ll unerringly navigate the 19th-century lanes, from tree-lined Charles Street to the curved blocks of Grove Street, from Jack’s coffee to Joe, or from the Cherry Lane Theatre to signless Chumley’s.

Master the Sidewalk Shuffle
You know you finally deserve to be inducted into this urban fraternity when you are out and about, and every last thought inside your head doesn’t turn to the weather or any other pleasant diversion, but burns laserlike with a single message for whatever sidewalk stragglers are unfortunate enough to be in front of you: “For the love of all that’s holy, get the fuck out of the way!”