25 Things You Won't Have When You Move to NYC

Last summer, I took one of those road trips across the country that you take on summers in your twenties. There were a lot of personal discoveries made that would bore you to tears were I to recount them here, so I'll spare you. One discovery I think is worth sharing is that people everywhere else in America have their own bathroom. My friend in Colorado had his own bathroom and two guest bathrooms. Adjusting for square footage, he and his roommates had eight times more bathroom than I enjoy in New York City. Not only will you not have your own bathroom, but don't be surprised if you extend your arms in any direction and touch two walls. Though your cramped, high use bathroom will annoy you, you'll grow to appreciate it. You will be stranded in the City without a bathroom in sight so often that you'll eventually learn to worship at the altar of your porcelain throne.

Whole Foods and Trader Joes are wonderful until they are the only options in your neighborhood. It is completely possible to walk into Whole Foods and spend a couple hundred dollars more to fill the same grocery list you could knock out for fifty bucks elsewhere. The same goes for the swank stores of Manhattan like Dean and Deluca and Westside Market. If your neighborhood has a normal grocery store, you can expect inflated prices and substandard produce. Shelves will be inexplicably empty. Don't worry, if they are fresh out of greek yogurt or your favorite brand of peanut butter, you can head over to the bodega and pay whatever price the cashier feels like making up. I have friends who will rent ZipCars and head to Jersey for food rather than endure the high-end Hell that is grocery shopping in New York City. No amount of artisanal cheese is worth bankruptcy or the legendary lines at the Union Square Trader Joes. Remember that when you consider taking your cloth shopping bag for one more round at Whole Foods.

Though the vibrant social life of the laundromat is great and all, most New Yorkers would give anything to have a washer and dryer in their building. After you move to New York, you will put off doing your laundry as long as humanly possible. When you are finally down to your last pair of ratty sweatpants and that shirt from your high school production of Our Town, you will make the trek the laundromat. Sure, the walk is never longer than a block or two, but weighed down by your sack of clothing and economy size bottle of detergent, it can feel like miles. As if having to leave home to launder your delicates wasn't enough, you always run the risk of returning to grab your clothes only to find that they've been stolen. Cue "Empire State of Mind" on repeat as you search in vain for your clothes in every washer and dryer in the place and sob lightly (OK, heavily) to yourself.

Malls are the worst. In high school, you may have thought that there was nothing better than swinging by Hot Topic and Pacific Sunwear before grabbing a jumbo soft pretzel, but you won't miss them one bit. There are two ways to approach shopping in New York. One, which I know next to nothing about, is choosing a neighborhood like SoHo or the Village and traipsing from store to store during an all day fashion update. The other is to choose one store every few months to buy shoes and a pair of pants and addressing the rest of your needs online. Both of these options are preferable to the suburban mall that doesn't have any stores you like and attract scores of obnoxious tweens. Unless you are the kind of person who loved nothing more than to idle away a Sunday perusing the Sunglasses Hut, you won't miss malls one bit.

I am an ambler. I like to walk slowly, eyeing passersby and buildings as I make my way to wherever I have to be. I always budget in extra time to get to meetings early so that I can arrive at my pace, and not stress about being late. This is not the way of the New Yorker. Residents of our fair city look like a pack of old ladies speed walking every time they leave one tall, grey building and begin the dash to the next. I would wager that a good percentage of New Yorkers have a walking gait that is faster than your parents' average jog. Contrary to popular (tourist) belief, it isn't self-importance that leads us to speed walk through life. New Yorkers know they will lose ten minutes somewhere on every commute. Your train will be delayed, construction will force you on a sidewalk detour, or the new barista's incompetence will hold up the line. Stubborn New Yorkers refuse to take ten minutes away from their precious time at home, so they simply move faster. Then, if you are a true New Yorker, you will blame slow trains when you arrive late to work.

When living in New York City, you'll often feel like some higher power or cruel puppet master is looking for small ways to make your life more difficult. For example, why do so many apartments not have dishwashers? Outside of college dorms, pretty much every domicile I've ever been invited into has a dishwasher. Yet, in the Big Apple, apartments don't often come equipped with them. If your apartment has a dishwasher, you'll probably pay an extra $200 a month just for the convenience. It may not seem like a big deal, but trust us, after you come home from a painfully long day at work, there is nothing so disheartening as staring down a pile of filthy dishes accumulated over the last week.

In many parts of the country, neighbors borrow sugar from one another, watch each other's pets while they're away, and even throw block parties to celebrate their neighborliness. In New York, we toss a nod of acknowledgement your way, but that's only after roughly half a decade of living in the same building. Considering that New Yorkers living in high-rises technically have hundreds of neighbors, it isn't hard to see why we lack the neighborly warmth of less densely populated areas. If we extended the same next door neighbor courtesies in the big city that you do in more rural areas, we would have to keep a barrel full of sugar on call at all times and our apartment would quickly become a discount kennel.

Apologies in advance to those of you who are all about the spirit of democracy and an active political dialogue or whatever, but I love living in a city where almost everyone agrees with me. Back in Middle America, you have to listen to people tell you that gay marriage is wrong or the people on welfare are lazy and treat the conversation like a legitimate dialogue. Growing up, I had bosses, teachers, and neighbors who loved nothing more than to pull me aside and extoll the virtues of Fox News. In New York (at least outside of the Financial District), conservatives realize that they are in the minority and keep a low profile. Liberals let their freak flag fly. Soda ban? Love it. Wild celebration in the streets when gay marriage passed? Amazing. A vocal disdain for Tea Party policies? Yes, please. You can hate me for not wanting to hear from the other side of the spectrum if you want, but I'll continue enjoying nitpicky arguments with my friends who agree with 95% of my political beliefs.

Every coffee shop in New York City is full from the hours of 8:30 am to 6:00 pm. I'm not sure why I can't force this fact into my brain. I can't count how many times I've been stuck for a couple hours between things in Midtown and thought to myself, "you know what, I'll just grab a latté and people watch." Before you judge me for drinking lattés, know that I didn't do that before I moved to New York either. So, I pay for my latté and realize that there are no seats available. After about fifteen minutes, when I've already finished my latté, a seat opens up. Of course, my laptop is low on battery, and there are only a few seats with access to an outlet. Also, I'm in the one wobbly chair in the entire place. I spend the rest of what was supposed to be a pleasant two-hour break strategizing how to improve my seat, and at one point, I wait in line for the bathroom for half an hour. Hey, at least, I can listen to shitty indie singer-songwriter garbage the entire time I'm there. Life is really about small blessings.

Landlords rarely take kindly to the presence of fire hazards on fire escapes. If you try to chain your grill in front of your house like a bicycle, it will probably fall victim to neighborly complaints or petty theft. For many men, there is nothing quite so beautiful as a grill and the bounty it can provide. Sadly, when your closet is only big enough to fit three blazers and a pair of dress pants, a grill is one of the first casualties. Many of you will compensate by grabbing yourself a George Foreman. While we respect your dedication to well prepared meats, you need to understand that the Lean, Mean Grilling Machine will be no substitute for the smoky flavors produced by your trusty Weber.

Public transportation is wonderful. The fact that you never have to worry about getting a DUI alone makes you appreciate our deeply flawed 24-hour transit system. I'm from a small town where the closest bar is ten miles away. Driving drunk is basically a hobby there. I actually know a guy who got so many DUIs that the Navy wouldn't let him enlist. Point being, I know that of which I speak. The problem with public transportation is that while everything you could possibly want is within an hour's journey, no trip you take is less than a half-hour long. Being a young-ish person in New York generally means that you live in a borough and work in Manhattan. So, that half-hour estimate isn't even taking into account train delays, the bagel line, malfunctioning ID scanners, and waiting for an elevator that isn't already packed to the gills. On a bad day, you're looking at an hour. Your only saving grace will be that bosses in New York don't seem to care if you're late for work, and often arrive well after you do.

New Yorkers are fiercely proud of the fact that we've kept the Walton family's grubby hands from rolling back into our neighborhood. Yes, there are a couple Targets, but unless you live right next to the Barclays Center or on the far east side of Harlem, you can't use them in the same way you did back home. In the suburbs, these huge box stores are your one-stop shop for all of the things you think you need. In New York, you have to go to seven or eight different stores to buy all the things you used to pick up at our neighborhood Wal-Mart. Sure, you can try those weird shops that sell random assortments of things that fell off of the back of trucks in the boroughs, but they aren't allowed to go into business unless they guarantee all of their merchandise will break within a week. Ideologically, most New Yorkers are thrilled that they don't have to see ugly box stores on every block. Practically, it would be nice to be able to buy a vacuum, a turkey, and a blu-ray in the same union busting location.

I'm not here to tell you that the big city will turn you into an atheist. You likely have a Bible thumping aunt who has already made that point repeatedly. Religious culture is very different in New York City. There are hundreds of houses of worship across various faiths, but I personally have very few friends who attend them. Those who do stay connected to their faith have an incredibly firm spiritual commitment: they make church, mosque, or synagogue a priority. Since most of your friends work long hours or multiple jobs, Saturdays and Sundays are usually reserved for relaxing over a mimosa-soaked brunch or getting in that artistic work that you missed out on during the week. Most New Yorkers are out so late on Saturday night that even an eleven o'clock service is pushing it. For some New Yorkers, moving out of their insular communities and into a world with radical cultural and economic disparity shakes their faith until it shatters. For many New Yorkers, religion is fine, but they just don't have the time.

Last time I was at my parents' house in Pennsylvania I called two friends to hang out. More accurately, I texted, because who calls anymore? One of them took four hours to respond and the other took an entire day. Why? They had "work" or "children" to attend to. In New York, we never let a little thing like living our lives get in the way of communicating. If you text us, we drop the bagel from hands and immediately text you back. If we are in a meeting, we will pretend to use the bathroom so we can shoot you an email. New York is introducing "Text Stops" because we can't put down our phones. Trust me. If you don't hear from a New Yorker within the hour, they're ignoring you.

No matter how much New York City kicks your ass, whenever you are out of the City for more than a week, you will be bored to tears. You'll be sitting at Chili's with some acquaintances from high school, discussing the finer points of accountancy and wishing you were back with your far more interesting friends in the Big Apple. Part of what makes New York so interesting is the oppressive economic conditions. Everyone is a "this" and a "that." Off the top of my head I know a chef/improv teacher, a translator/environmental theatre artist, and a salesman/acrobat. There are also jobs in New York that don't exist anywhere else. Before I moved here I knew no one in the following professions: fire artist, DJ school professor, busking accordionist, metal sculptor, infographic designer. In some cases, I know several people with these jobs and have introduced them to each other. New York will kick your ass, but at least you'll have interesting people to commiserate with along the way.

As is often the case, Louis C.K. has a better take on this than I could ever muster. In this clip from Season 1 of Louie, C.K. talks about how New Yorkers don't do much for the homeless. "We all passed him," he says, "but she saw him. She's the only one who actually saw him." It's not that New Yorkers don't care about the less fortunate. New Yorkers are politically liberal and every one of us has pet causes and charities. This charitable mindset simply doesn't extend to our day to day. I had flashbacks listening to Louie say, "We start correcting her behavior like she's doing something wrong—we don't do that here." It's true. We don't do that here. New Yorkers are accosted on every block in Midtown by workers from charity organizations, some legitimate and some not. As soon as we step through the subway turnstile, we are harangued for a dollar. When people ask me to tell them one thing about New York, I tell them that every time you walk out the door, you spend twenty bucks. No New Yorker is looking to give away another one. This isn't an attempt to vindicate the population of New York for their cold shoulder to the less fortunate, nor is finger wagging admonishing. Frankly, I can't remember the last time I gave a dollar to a homeless man. This is just an admission that Louie is right—we don't do that here.

If you can't find a woman that interests you in New York City, you aren't looking hard enough. Back in high school, you were able to pull the "there just aren't any girls who get me" card as you swooped your emo haircut to the side and played that Dashboard Confessional album for the thousandth time. Once you move to New York, you are forced to admit that you're the problem. If you want to meet a woman with a particular interest, you just Google "bar + [thing you are interested in] + NYC" and get dozens of results. There is also no shortage of groups and organizations to join if the bar scene isn't your thing. Since no one has a car, you are going to be in close proximity to scores of beautiful women from the moment you walk out your front door until you stumble back in at the end of the night. In short, the beautiful and terrible thing about New York City is that nothing is stopping you from meeting the right women but yourself.

Your challenge in New York won't be finding something to do; it will be finding the right something to do. Every night of the week there are so many things going on that dozens of websites make their bones just listing the ones that they find most interesting. It isn't about whether or not you want to go to a jazz concert, it is about what sort of jazz concert you want to attend. In reality, the Stefan sketches from Saturday Night Live aren't so much a satire as they are a naturalistic retelling of every New Yorker's Friday night decision making. All of the your options for recreation in New York do have one thing in common: they are incredibly expensive. Just make sure you've got the bank account to match your curiosity before you go experience the best of what New York has to offer.

"Six dollar drafts during happy hour." No, that isn't some kind of sick joke. That, friends, is the kind of special you run into in this city. Honestly, I've come to prefer bars that don't do specials. Don't insult me by offering me a five dollar Bud Light bottle. I have honestly encountered pints of beer that cost as much as a six pack of that same beer at the grocery store. Before you graduate college or move out of your parents' house, go ahead and get blackout drunk on as many dollar pitcher specials as you can because those days are numbered. As a drinking enthusiast, it took me a long time to come to terms with drink prices in New York. I remember being furious every time I looked at a beer price for the entire first year I lived here. Every time I recevied a bill, I did a comical double take with wide bulging eyes as steam blew out of my ears (Sounds sexy, doesn't it ladies?). My advice to you is to just stop worrying and love your bar tab. If you go out for drinks, you are going to spend fifty dollars. If you don't have fifty dollars, buy a Colt 45 and sit on your stoop.

Yards are high on my list in the category of "you never know what you had until it's gone." I hated mowing the lawn as a kid. I never understood why anal-retentive fathers in the neighborhood kept their yards in such good shape. Now that I am without a yard, I would love nothing more than to be forced to maintain grass of my own. If you aren't lucky enough to live a stone's throw away from one of the few sizable parks in New York, you don't see much green. Sure, your block might have a tree, or there might be some public space with two cubic feet of grass and a park bench, but that's about it. When you move here, you might be lucky enough to have two or three friends with a swatch of patchy grass to call their own. If so, you can put the over/under on how many parties they'll throw back there every summer at ten, because every one of your friends will relish the chance to bask in the glory of sweet, sweet grass, even if there's only enough of it for one of you to enjoy it at a time.

It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a car in the City, even for the masses who fudge their insurance with out of state plates. There are so many benefits to not having a car here. You'll avoid the traffic, crazy parking fees, hyper-aggressive meter maids (and meter masters) and the hundreds of other little headaches that come with Big Apple car ownership. Even though being able to do something other than watch the road on your commute is nice, you'll probably miss the solitude of driving. When the time comes to move apartments, pick up a friend at the airport, or if you just get that urge to get out of the City and breathe again, you'll wish you had wheels. Odds are you'll be tapping ZipCar or that one friend who needs his wheels for work when you're absolutely desperate. Even though it makes sense not to have a car, you'll probably miss driving. If you're anything like me, the moment you have access to an automobile you'll just drive around for a couple hours to remember what it feels like to be behind the wheel again.

You will have no room to do anything in New York. My first room was a plywood closet in a warehouse in Williamsburg that was so small I had to perch my desk on top of it. Later I graduated to splitting a one-bedroom with another person and converted my bed to a couch every morning when I woke up. Now, I've finally arrived. I am writing this in my own bedroom, in which my desk touches my bed. In New York you will sleep in a tiny bedroom, shower in a tiny bathroom, cram onto an overstuffed subway, arrive at work in a packed office, hit your crowded gym after work, and then meet a ladyfriend at a bar that violates fire code. There is something lovely about the complete lack of space in New York. There is something about the tight quarters that forces people to rub elbows that legendarily promotes creativity. The problem is that it is also really sucks to walk out of a room and have other people's sweat caked on you. The good news is if things get to cramped for you, you can always go the park and enjoy finally having some space with everybody else.