During the World Cup, my husband kept sending me funny videos of people visiting the United States for the tournament. Visitors from Europe and other parts of the world were sharing their first impressions of America online, and I found myself enjoying the videos more than I expected.
Some visitors walked through Walmart as though it were an attraction of its own. One person could not believe how large the candy bars were. Someone wondered why American pickup trucks looked so angry. Another laughed when the GPS told them to stay on the same road for hundreds of miles.
The comment sections and reaction videos became almost as entertaining as the videos themselves. Americans were asking, “Do Europeans have anything over there?” Europeans were asking why everything in America was so big. Some visitors tried Chick-fil-A and other restaurants for the first time. Others were impressed by the highways, the friendliness of strangers, and even the sunsets.
At first, I thought I enjoyed the videos because they were funny. After watching enough of them, however, I realized there was something else I liked about them. They made ordinary things noticeable again.
The people who live here are not usually amazed by Walmart or an American pickup truck. These are simply parts of everyday life. Yet through the eyes of someone encountering them for the first time, they became interesting again.
It made me wonder how much familiarity changes the way we see the places where we live. How many things have I stopped noticing because I see them all the time?
I thought about the two years I spent living in England when I was younger. People make jokes about British food, but that was never how I experienced it. I remember looking forward to Fridays because we would have fish fingers and chips. Beans on toast did not seem unusual to me because I had grown up eating something similar before I ever arrived in England. On weekends, my aunt would sometimes treat us to kebabs. Looking back now, I also appreciate how many cultures I encountered through food while I was there. Indian, Turkish, Caribbean, African, and other cuisines were simply part of life around us.
I do not remember spending much time thinking that England was strange. I adjusted to the differences and accepted that this was how people lived there.
Maybe that is part of what I enjoyed about watching the World Cup visitors. Every place has an ordinary life that is uniquely its own. The grocery store, the local restaurant, the roads people drive every day, and the food children grow up eating may seem unremarkable to the people who live there. To someone arriving for the first time, those same things can become memories they carry home.
By the final week of the World Cup, my family and I were in New York.
I had visited New York years before when I was younger, but this time I was there with my husband and children.
As we walked through Times Square, I watched my children take in the lights, the buildings, the crowds, and everything happening around them. Visitors from around the world were still in the city for the tournament, and suddenly I was no longer watching their experiences through videos on my phone. I was surrounded by them while also watching my children experience New York for themselves.
New York was not new to me, but experiencing it with my family was. My children were making their own first memories of a place I had visited when I was younger, and seeing their reactions made me pay attention differently.
I noticed things I might otherwise have passed without much thought. I watched what caught their attention and what excited them. Even Times Square, which I had seen before, felt different because I was experiencing it with people who were seeing it for the first time.
I had thought the videos were mostly about visitors discovering things that were unfamiliar to them. Watching my children in New York made me realize that they were also showing me something about familiarity. Seeing their excitement had changed the way I was looking too.
It made me wonder how many things in my own life I no longer really see because they are familiar.
Perhaps wonder does not always come from discovering something new. Sometimes someone else can easily help us notice what was already there.
Maybe, from time to time, we all need borrowed eyes.
New York City, Summer 2026
