On Saint Patricks' Eve
Here in the U.S., across the sea from much of what takes place in the world, one of our principle cultural assumptions is that of the melting-pot, (at least among white people.)

Three generations ago, our Italian ancestors were reviled, and another few back, it was the Irish; these people with their strange smells and strange cookingand crime (automatically theirs, as a group.) Move up just one generation, and these things had become mainly jokes and loose stereotypes, and even these faded by the time we came around. Now, our cultural origins are reduced to anecdotal fodder at bars:
-Oh, you're German? I'm a quarter-German.
-My middle name is Dutch, so I think there's some of that back there, too.
-Anyway, want another Bass?

And we go to Europe. We ride the trains which pass so easily from nation to nation there, and we are surprised that there could still be any great difference at all, between these white people over here, and these ones, nine hours away. After all, everyone's the same and everybody's equal, as we like to say, and will say, automatically if roused from a deep sleep and asked. We view their differences as
antiquated curiosity.

-Look, we say, reading from Lonely Planet. -Over here, they make these funny clocks. And over here, they make this dish with sausage.
(It's actually a dish your great-grandmother would recall with pleasure: the way the fennugreek would burn the nostrils, the way the sausage's thin skin would burst
between the incisors when her mother made it every week.)
-We must buy one of those clocks, says your companion.
But you wrinkle your nose at the sausage-thing followed by eight more hours on the train. You'll grab a sandwich. They have those, right?