A New York Encounter

What better way to spend the one Sunday you have in New York than to buy yourself a camera which should enable you to shoot your own news reports, thought my cousin. She had thought the same about the Saturday, but she had been recommended to go and shop at the B&H which, she found out later, was run by orthodox Jews and so no luck on Saturday. And so I come in fresh from Atlanta and so it is Sunday morning with us and a shop full of kippa wearing salesmen- men, of course. There's also a Metropolis like pulley and train system right above our heads, carrying I don't know what I don't know where.
So we munch on our kosher sweets, and two of the salesmen are very keen to get my cousin the best deal, when the sickly looking one disappers, we get into a convo with the healthy looking one, he asks where we are from and says 'So, reporting live from Turkey, eh?" "Eh" my cousin concurs. "Reporting more, like, from New York, from a shop that closes on Saturdays" I say. He laughs and adds "Well, you know, not only is the shop closed on Saturdays, but the website is down as well". Hats, kippas, headscarves off. The Spanish tourists are watching our conversation with hidden glee. Then the sickly salesman appears. He wants in on the conversation. "So where are you from?" he asks.
This time we want to play it. "Guess" we tell him. First he smiles signifying impossibility. My cousin says the inevitable cliche "Somewhere between the East and the West". He smiles impossibility for one more second, but then the cliché has worked and he says "Turkey?" We are now in a full-blown conversation. We want to take it somewhere but we don't know where. I venture "So where are you from?" "New York" he says. I try to push it a little to find some common ground and ask "And your people?" . "New York" he says again. In the sociality of the moment I loose grip of the situation and ask as I do any American "How about in Europe? Where are they from in Europe?" His look tells me before he says anything that I am touché. "Germany and Poland".
Silence.
"Interesting, I spent two years in Heidelberg" is not going to cut it this time.