Are any of these challah makers among the Chosen People? It’s NYC, so we couldn’t care less.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard a tourist in New York City say, “I mean it’s a nice place to visit…”, implying that it’s a terrible place to live, then I’d have at least enough money to buy an unlimited Metrocard for this month. These assertions irk me, primarily because I’m pretty sure that New York is an awful place to visit, what with the getting lost and the questionable smells and the surly raccoons stealing your French fries in Central Park.

But I would also argue that New York is actually a much better place to live than to visit. And no, I’m not saying that only because of the food, though we’ll definitely get to that. One of the things I love is that you’re always running across weird happenings that would be near impossible to find if you were only here for a few days. This weekend, for example, was the Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas Festival, celebrating the collision of Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican cultures on the Lower East Side.

One could get a combo of the festival’s signature foods for six dollars, which was a sucker punch of deep fried goodness with a chaser of dairy—not for the faint of stomach but delicious all the same. A word on egg creams for the uninitiated: there’s no egg! Or cream, for that matter. Just chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer water. Why this naming paradox came about, no one is entirely sure, but they will argue about it anyway, in a very New York sort of way.

The charms of the festival went beyond food. It was run by the Eldridge Street Museum (another NYC plus: there’s always a museum you’ve never heard of before), which is a beautifully restored synagogue built in 1887, and it was pretty awesome to prowl around the building, watching the Chinatown Senior Center Orchestra play in the main sanctuary right in front of the ark and tip-toeing past the tea ceremony in the balcony to admire the stained glass windows. In the basement, people were perusing the Chinese paper sculptures and Puerto Rican bobbin lace and kids were exuberantly slinging challah dough. Out front, you could decorate your very own dragon mask, paper fan or yarmulke.

Sure, there was a goofy, lighthearted tone to the day, but it seems like a particularly important time to be embracing cultural diversity. The Puerto Rican community was hit hard in last week’s massacre in Orlando, losing twenty-three members in the shooting. It was impossible for that not to be in the back of my mind while I watched a man slowly and meticulously construct a beautiful Puerto Rican mask out of papier-maché.

My favorite thing about New York is that there’s a little bit of everything living and breathing and co-existing here. New Yorkers might seem abrasive to a lot of people, but the truth is that millions of us get up every morning and sweat it out on the train together and grouse at each other and almost always decide to live and let live without harming each other. If you’re a visitor, the city probably looks like a mess; if you live here, it begins to look like the better impulses of humanity, exercised daily on a massive scale. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s worth raising your egg cream in salute.