As we were walking on Orchard Street listening on our ear buds, we noticed a Chinese man unloading green, mesh-covered crates from a graffiti-covered delivery truck. Something inside the crates was moving: hundreds of softball-size, ugly frogs!

After we recovered from our frog fright, we continued the tour, which ended at Katz’s Delicatessen, about a mile and little more than an hour after its start. Then it was off to South Ferry and the Staten Island Ferry, a freebie with views of the Statue of Liberty. Unlike Statue Cruises, which takes visitors to Liberty Island and costs $12, the city’s ferry doesn’t offer much room to stand outside, and you don’t get to stop at the Statue of Liberty or at Ellis Island. But there’s also no line and you can go 24 hours. (The round trip takes just about an hour.) The crowd was divided between bored commuters and excited visitors who pointed out the statue to their children on the way out and snapped endless photos of the Manhattan skyline on the way back.

After debarking, we took the subway up to Times Square and headed over to Margon, a hidden lunch counter on 46th Street that serves Cuban specialties. We split a Cuban sandwich ($6) and pork chops with a huge mound of rice and beans ($9) (and the check) and added two Coronas for $2.50 each, which exhausted my alcohol budget. Lunch ended past 4, and Valeria took off for other (less frugal) engagements.

I hopped the subway to the Guggenheim, where late every Saturday afternoon, crowds line up for the pay-what-you-wish admission period, from 5:45 to 7:45. Folks usually pay a dollar ($17 less than general admission), according to the woman who took my $5. Though several New York museums have a permanent pay-what-you-wish policy (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History), you feel sort of weaselly doing it. But because the Guggenheim publicizes its temporary pay-what-you-want admission, you can hand over your $1 guilt-free.

At the museum, throngs of young people made the coiled rounds of the museum to see the exhibition “Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy & Germany, 1918-1936,” which focuses on artists’ partial return to classic forms after World War I. (It closes Jan. 9.)

After a bite, I decided to blow $9 of my remaining $10 culture budget (and another MetroCard swipe) on whatever was at the Anthology Film Archives. I got there for Lou Castel’s “Pyramidial,” which I would have renamed “Guy Leaves His Low-Quality 1990s Video Camera on by Accident.” I may have missed the experimental point, but I wasn’t alone. Or rather, I was. By the time I walked out halfway through, I was the last of the original eight audience members. It was a few dollars cheaper than a new release, but the bargain came at a cost.

SUNDAY

This seemed like an ideal day to explore contemporary Manhattan coffeehouse culture and to fulfill a New York weekend dietary requirement, the bagel with cream cheese. The dose of coffeehouse culture would come from Grounded, in the Village. I can vouch for its bagels (from Murray’s) and cafe bona fides (comfy sofa, plants, artistic brown-and-white patterns topping their lattes). It’s on a side street, which filters out passers-by and leaves a crowd of mostly regulars.