All I Did Was Ask

The thing about moving to a new place where you barely know anyone is that you have to be more outgoing than you normally would.

For someone who's naturally shy, it's challenging. But it's also the only way to make New York feel more like home.

There are plenty of things about this city that are different enough from L.A. to make me wish I hadn't left: the cutthroat competition, the bustle, the noise, the traffic, the public transportation that does away with the need for a car.

It's hard to make friends, but on the upside, it's exceedingly easy to meet people. So long as your good sense and sense of curiosity and adventure are intact, it's possible to have a whole series of random experiences and new discoveries. And perhaps that has been the best part of being here.

From accidentally catching sight of magnificent architectural details on a miserably humid day to incidentally wandering into warm, tiny bars during a frigid evening, this year has been one of little moments of discovery that have made me smile during hard times and made the foreign feel familiar.

The most surprising thing is the number of people I've chanced to meet because I dared to rouse myself from the comfort of home and see who else might be out there just, you know, taking things in.

About 1,000 geeks like me gathered at the historic New Yorker Hotel for a free "unconference" on podcasting. Among the attendees were the smart, the arty, the desperate and the Web famous, and all of them would answer any questions put their way.

Designer Toni Hacker and partner Ben Harnett were very gracious during the opening of their shop in Green Point, Brooklyn. (Check out their winter sale going on 'til Jan. 14.)

In a bar, where so many New Yorkers seem to be when they're not working, I met my first — and so far only — honest to goodness modelizer.

When a dear friend in L.A. invited me to the San Francisco Bay to Breakers run, I figured, why the heck not, and met the harried but fun-loving parents of a vivacious little girl.

The author Calvin Trillin was a bit blank during the reading of his paean to his beloved wife, Alice, at the Strand Bookstore, which was somewhat unexpected.

A businessman, a guitarist and I talked shop while sharing a cab during a strike. Afterward, a friend and I marveled at the views and laughed at the exhibitionist bathrooms in the so hip it's pretentious Hotel on Rivington.

A transplant from Europe talked about how he got here, and where he hoped to go.

Marvelous cheeses were mine for the eating, served up by a friendly staff at a restaurant whose featured dish still causes embarrassed giggling.

After watching a college basketball game with a group of strangers, the actuary I sat next to went Dutch with me at a Moroccan restaurant, leading to an interesting discussion about insurance, unions and the ways in which universities change.

To close out the year, a man I met during an errand took me to the neighborhood Cuban-Mexican joint, where he introduced me to chili-powder and parmesan cheese-covered grilled corn and a hyperspicy masa dish called "tlacoyo de Tres Marias."

Though there's so much of the city that's still unknown to me, I've been lucky to have been around for a lot. And how did any of this start? With a question that led to conversation and a willingness to try new things. Terry Gross had it right.