A (Polish) bar.

So the other week before meeting a friend for a drink I left a little early to catch a drink someplace else early, and I ended up going to a (Polish) bar in a neighborhood that has a vestigial Polish population (i.e. they left for further out where real estate prices were cheaper)...

(I knew it was Polish from the "Zywiec" beer sign outfront.)

Anyhow, so I go in, and there's a few (white) hipsters sitting on the stools, and this older (white) lady with a very glossy face, and when I sit down, I'm sniffling like no other, like I had been all day, and I start asking her if there's a cold going around, or if it's allergies, and she (in accented English) starts telling me that it's allergies, everyone's been coming in with them.

So, we start talking about that, and I start telling her about neti pots, which she had never heard of, and she started saying that there's a lot of (Polish) natural healing stores that have medicines from India, Korea, and Japan.

We talked some more, and I told her I was (half Polish), and I started asking her about her immigration story.

It turns out that her grandparents had been in the U.S. and her dad was born here, but then they decided to move back to Poland before WWII, and so her dad grew up there as a U.S. citizen, and thus was able to take all his kids under the age of 18 back to the U.S. in the 1970s no problem.

At that point, I introduced myself, and she held out her hand and said her name, which is the same as the name of the bar (minus the apostrophe).

She also said that there's been no young (Polish) people in the city like there used to be, ever since Poland joined the EU; because of that, a lot of students get siphoned off to the UK, and a lot of the construction workers get siphoned off to Austria and Italy. She said things might change if the U.S. economy picks up, but anyone who comes here now usually goes back after a few months because there's just not enough work here, comparatively.