Day 10 - New York City - Lower East Side

After a poor night's sleep we ended up sleeping in quite late.

We got up and made breakfast in our apartment, showered and dressed. We headed across the street to a hairdresser where Sharon booked an appointment for tomorrow.

We then headed off looking for Penn Station so we could get a New York street and subway map and purchase our weekly Subway tickets. We then took a subway down to the Lower East Side for a tour of the Tenement Museum. This is an old tenement building that was discovered in the late 1980s that had been boarded up since the 1930s. They have restored two of the apartments to reflect respective families that lived in these apartments. We went on the 'Hard Times' tour which focused on two families, one from the 1870s and 1880s and another family that lived in another of the apartments in the 1920s and 1930s.

The tour was great and very interesting, and the guide was very knowledgeable about the family histories. It was great to hear and see how these families lived as immigrants to a new country. It was quite similar to the tour of the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam.

After the tour we went to a vegan shoe store just up the street from the museum and Sharon purchased a pair of waterproof black dress boots. There were plenty of great shoes in the store that were vegan, and sustainably and ethically made.
We then walked over a few blocks to the Chinatown area where there was a vegetarian Dim Sum restaurant that Sharon had researched. We went in around 5:50pm for a very late lunch or very early dinner and had some great vegan chinese food. We had plenty left over to bring back to our apartment.

On the walk back to the subway we stumbled across Little Italy and had a walk through looking at the restaurants in this area. The streets were all decorated with Christmas decorations and as it was now dark it all looked quite nice.

Both China Town and Little Italy are really quite large compared to the same type of areas I have seen in other cities around the world. By this time we were tired of being on our feet and headed back for the subway and made our way back up to midtown, stopped off for a few grocery supplies and then back to our apartment.



Today's Weather

Wind: Variable at 6 MPH (5 KT)

Visibility: 10 mile(s)

Sky conditions: overcast

Temperature: 45.0 F (7.2 C)

Dew Point: 28.9 F (-1.7 C)

Relative Humidity: 53%

Pressure (altimeter): 30.01 in. Hg (1016 hPa)