I thought I knew what I was doing when I planned a visit to New York City the week of Christmas, but I wasn’t completely prepared for what my adult kid described as “watching the NPCs in a badly-made video game, walking into walls and standing dumb in front of closed windows.”

You see, when I visit NYC from Philly, as I do once a month and have for years, I am a tourist. I embrace being a tourist. But I am not actually here for the first time, and for some reason I forgot how many other people have never been here before.

I boarded my train and found an eleven-year-old from Virginia in my reserved seat, for instance. Her mother pleaded with me to let them sit together, but I said I get carsick if I’m not in a window seat, so I made her move. They spent the rest of the trip loudly discussing what they were going to do when they got to Manhattan (I tuned out as soon as they mentioned Rockefeller Center, which I avoid at the best of times) with the mother having a loud professional conversation about a client’s melasmus on her phone, and a gentleman standing facing her and talking in a loud voice about every possible conventional topic under the sun.

The whole train was pretty much full of people like that. They were all anxiously looking around. All hoping they were going the right direction. All planning what they were going to do and see once they got to the big city.

But the conductor was prepared. She had Christmas lights wreathing her cap, and she kept coming through making loud, clear, in-person announcements aimed at helping first-timers manage their trip. It was charming. She knew, you see, that in normal times the announcements are made indistinctly over the PA, while everyone ignores them, but this group of passengers actually needed to know what she was saying.

As we approached the end of the trip, she planted herself in the middle of the train car and told them where to go for Moynihan, where to go for Penn Station, and where the best place was for catching a taxi. Everyone got up far too early, grabbing all their many, many enormous suitcases.

I waited until almost everyone was off, found the conductor, and slipped her a twenty for making my trip tolerable. She hugged me.

Then I headed for the subway, as I always do, to make my annual pilgrimage to the Met’s Christmas tree (I have a membership so that I can just pop in and visit one or two things every time I go).

At the Met, though I found a good spot to enjoy the tree and the music they play this time of year, I kept getting hit by people’s backpacks as they shoved past me for a good selfie angle, even though I had my back to a column and was well out of the way. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is crowded at all times, but this was like being inside a naked mole rat hive.

I escaped the throngs, caught my usual M1 bus, and slipped into Grand Central because I love the way it looks this time of year: dim, spacious, sparkly, and warm. The crowds at the tops of the stairs taking a photo of the main floor were hard to get past, as were the crowds in the holiday market, but I enjoyed my little visit. Then I caught the subway down to my Art Deco hotel, checked in, and wandered over to Union Square to look at their holiday market, which I had heard was nice.

It was indeed nice, in the freezing darkness, all the little glowing shops, even though many of the shops were duplicates of the ones surrounding City Hall in Philadelphia, and duplicates of the ones in Bryant Park. I don’t mind. But boy, oh, boy, was it crowded.

I worked my way through it, past great clots of oblivious people taking selfies of themselves.

It was lovely.

Sometimes I think I go to New York to watch the tourists, I realized this morning while having my continental breakfast in the basement of my hotel. Everyone else in the restaurant was my age, and wearing sensible shoes. Most of them, from what I could hear, were speaking some other language.

I remember my first time in New York City. It was in the first week of my freshman year in college, and my roommate and I and several new acquaintances from our dorm floor all piled onto the subway and came down here near where my hotel is. It was 1968. We were giggling. It felt dangerous. We were all walking into walls and staring into windows, because everything was entirely new. We were in a group, so it didn’t matter that everyone could tell we had never been here before.

It was a different place then, much shabbier, with a lot less money and a lot more cockroaches, but I have never lost that feeling of being a NPC in the big city.