People! Lots of people; skyscrapers lining both sides of a pedestrian street that is just full of briskly-moving people. He can hear a subway underground, and see the stop two blocks in the distance, people filing up and down escalators. People brush impatiently past him, apparently undisturbed that he appeared in the middle of nowhere. They're distinctly shorter-than-human and their hair comes in an astonishing variety of colors: bright yellows and oranges and purples and greens and silvers and white. Yellow seems to be most popular.

...and literally no one has dark hair. Huh. He should—perhaps not stand out quite as much. His hair turns yellow fast enough someone else might think it was just a trick of the light.

He's still the tallest person around but his hair stands out less! People continue to indifferently brush past him.

Okay good. He supposes.

He doesn't have local currency, but he can wish up some. He looks for some hidden alley.

That's a hidden alley! It has garbage cans, and is painted red.

Uh huh. He zips that way and looks around to see whether it's really empty—

Looks it.

Okay, he reaches inside a small pouch that is way bigger on the inside and grabs a pink fist-sized crystal. He wishes up some local currency—

Now he has some colorful cardstock-ish bills in his hand.

And the pink crystal becomes pink dust which he's quick enough to collect inside the bag of holding.

Next up: looking for a cafe or some such.

When he walks out of the alley people glance at him with alarm and disgust and veer out of his way and in a few cases run off. 

...what.

Anyone talking about it?

Not really! Pulling other people out of his way, in one or two cases, with a gesture at the alley as if that is self-explanatory.

And now there are silver people with batons directing the crowd around the entrance to the alleyway and walking over towards him.

...sounds like something he doesn't understand and he's not entirely sure he wants this world's first impression to be him in prison. He zips through the alley too fast for the (human) eye to see and out the other side and a bit away before rounding a corner at a regular speed.

He is among unalarmed colorful people again!

Yeah now he'll go to a cafe.

Purple-haired servers will take his order. 

He has translation magic; he orders whatever seems most normal or common or whatever there, and...

...he doesn't like to think of it as listening in but that's what it is. He'll stop paying attention to any conversations that sound too personal but he wants to understand this place a bit better.

" - trying to get a second mortgage on my parents' house so we can afford a baby this year, if we wait until next we'll be shorthanded in the restaurant -"

" - my manager's a sweetheart but she's not very good at her job and so the department's kind of treading water - they could promote me but no -"

" - owes me four hundred ni and I'd take her to court but I think filing fees and so on come to half that and if she doesn't have the money there's not much they can do -"

" - and then he was like 'I just don't see a future together' and I'm like, okay, but you could have said that to me three seasons ago and not wasted my time -"

" - the R was shut down between Cobblestone and Central because someone threw himself onto the tracks, can you believe how inconsiderate - disgusting -"

He can pay attention to a large number of conversations. He'll just wait there, with his eyes closed, until he catches something meaningfully different, paying more attention to weirder conversations and less to more mundane ones.

"My grandson wants to study robotics, I'm so proud of him of course but I'm not going to sleep a wink - he's an only child, I wish he'd choose something safer -"

"It was creeping around the alley behind our house in the middle of the night, startled my husband and he shot it - the police were very understanding but discharging a weapon within city limits is still a very expensive fine - we're going to try to explain to the judge -"

"She's a gift for singing but she hits the out-of-caste income cap by mid-season and then it doesn't help us with the bills at all -"

" - my cousin married blue - Inaset, you remember her, stunningly pretty and knows how to use it - and said he could maybe arrange a travel visa but nothing's come of it yet -"

...yeah those all sound interesting he pays attention to those.

"I thought the university protected them," says first conversation's interlocutor dubiously, "put them in the medical devices department or something so no one had to know -"

            "Oh, I mean, it's not as if they have a department of robotics with a sign on the door but there are ways it could get out -"

"Firing into an alley shouldn't really count as discharging a weapon in a city," agrees second conversation's companion, "the point of that law is presumably that you could negligently hurt someone but no one's going to be in an alley -"

           "That's what I think! And the fine'd be a real hardship, and we've never been in trouble with the law before -"

"I know someone who made tutorials, put them online, said they were teaching singing and then it's in-caste income -"

           "That's clever, I'll tell her to try it - does it matter if most of the money's not really from the teaching -"

Travel visa people have moved on to discussing sites they'll see on the planned trip if they get permission.

Travel visa person can be ignored, he can pay attention to the others.

"There could be a high-security facility somewhere -"

       "Then the riots would just be at random -"

"When's the court date -"

      "Tomorrow, I took the morning off work -"

"I think you could get in trouble if someone really had it out for you but not otherwise."

     "Well if someone really had it out for us I'm sure the daycare's breaking some obscure rule I've never even heard of -"