[ithkuil]

I come from Croatia and have lived in Italy for a long time and it's very rare to find anybody who can barely place our countries on a map until fairly recently and let alone heard about foods or drinks. Not zero people of course, but very few

[senderista]

I doubt many Americans can name a single Canadian province or Mexican state.

[ithkuil]

just to be clear, mine was not a jab against the georgaphy or culture knowledge of the average Italian. They are likely to know more details about German, French or Spanish geographical or culinary features than something from the balkans despite sharing a border.

[dhosek]

Indeed. I grew up in a cultural milieu that was overwhelmingly Slavic (Chicago suburbs, mostly Czech and Polish but smaller numbers of Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs) and even within that, the lack of understanding of distinctions was surprising (so many people thought Slovak and Slovene were the same thing, which isn’t helped by the fact that the countries have very similar flags since independence and near-identical demonyms in their own languages) although I would note that the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were all highly aware of the distinctions between themselves and even as cultural self-identification as specific Slavs in Chicago has faded, there’s still a low-level hostility between Slovenes/Croats and Serbs.

[senderista]

I don't know how large the Lithuanian community in Chicago is, but when I lived on the South Side in the late 90s there was an amazing Lithuanian restaurant called just "Healthy Food", a weird amalgam of traditional Lithuanian cuisine and hippie wheat germ and molasses-based fare. They also sold amber jewelry, as well as their own swag like "I ♥ Kugelis" T-shirts. Anyone remember that place?

[tptacek]

It's the largest population of Lithuanians outside of Lithuania, for what it's worth.

[dhosek]

I’d never been there, but there seem to at least be multiple Lithuanian restaurants in the Chicago area. Sadly, while there were literally dozens of Czech restaurants when I was a kid, now there are three.

[senderista]

Chicago has been shrinking for decades and it's tragic. Even in the 90s there were whole blocks on the South Side (I lived in Back of the Yards) that were just abandoned.

[dhosek]

I suspect many Americans would have trouble identifying all the American states. I wouldn’t use Americans as a model of geographic awareness.