Today I am back in the lower east side at the Tenement museum to do the final two tours - Foods of the lower east side and Shop life. As today is going to be about grazing on local food, I thought I would go all out and have a street food brunch. I returned to Washington square where Jane and I did the Greenwich village food tour and bought some falafel and a slice of the white artichoke pizza, and took these and had a picnic in Washington park. So good, but there was no way I was ever going to finish that one pizza slice. I watched the chess guys doing their hussle, the usual squirrel antics, and a playgroup of children learning how to jump in a sack. The musicians today included a guy with a grand piano, don't know how he got that to the park!

To walk it off I went the long way to the museum, through the east village and st marks place, then all the way down to the lower east side. I was a bit surprised about the east village, it was grungy and tacky, lots of junk shops and tattoo parlours, a mix of ethnic eats and American stodge. The lower east side has a much cooler vibe, even though it is still rough around the edges and even smells in parts.

The first tour was Foods of the Lower east side, and is a walking tour for two hours. We all met and introduced ourselves in a classroom, and had a discussion about what it means for food to be authentic, and how foods get adopted into general population from ethnic groups. We stop as a group outside of different shops and hear a history about the food and then eat a sample of the food being discussed. Among the many things we tried - pretzels, pickled cucumber and pickled pineapple, bialys (a type of bagel), Mexican fresh cheese with guava paste, soppressa with Parmesan, chocolate covered pretzel, fried plantains, choux pastry with green tea custard, vegetarian dumplings. As always with food tours there is alot of interaction and its really enjoyable as well as informative.

I get back in time to do the Shop Life tour which talks about the various businesses that occupied the tenement building up to the 1980s, focusing on the original German beer hall and the family who lived behind it. I cannot recommend this museum enough to anyone going to New York, it is intimate, unique and full of stories of the people who make the city.

The afternoon is glorious and I walk past an Enotica and stop for a Lambrusco and some arancini balls and watch life go by in the lower east side village. I keep walking through Soho and see some pop up markets, a great bookshop and the city come to life at night.