So yesterday my nephew arrived from the U.K. for a two-day extravaganza in NYC. It was bitterly cold but dry and busier than usual with gridlock traffic alert firmly in place.
About half way through the sightseeing and wotnot, we decided to stop at a side street vendor for a little pick me up snack.

The vendor was pleasant and joked around with us in his broken English. He tried to sell us all cold drinks even thought the temperature was in the low 30’s F. We paid and left, aware that we had probably overpaid for the hotdogs and pretzels as this was NYC and you are paying for the “experience” as tourists and not the just the food.

About a hundred feet down the road we heard a cry from behind the stand. This little man came running after us waving a five-dollar bill in his hand. He explained that we had overpaid and he owed us an additional five dollars in change. I was gobsmacked. We all were so much so that we just accepted the money and smiled, almost in shock. A few minutes later we thought that we should have just let him keep it as an additional tip but then agreed that it was too late to go back…

So we decided to give it to a Salvation Army collector later on that day and felt better for doing that. In the end the man and the five-dollar bill actually restored a little of my faith in humans and especially in the people of NYC. Manhattanites are sometimes chagrined as being too mouthy, too loud and too obnoxious. This trip proved that, as a tourist for one day in NYC, human kindness was to be found in the most unusual of places.