We were standing on a street corner. We wanted to eat Korean Samgyeopsal, so we had found a restaurant on California Avenue on the North side, but the place only opened at 4:30 and it was only 3:30, so we had to wait a while. We walked around, and Curt struck up a conversation with a Korean dry cleaner. Maybe it's true that all dry cleaners in the US are Korean – certainly I have almost never met a non-Korean dry cleaner.
Curt had fixated on finding a place to get a haircut. He is pretty brave, socially, so on his own initiative, he stopped two middle school girls coming out of the nearby school. Entirely typical middle-school girls from the big American city – which is to say, the girls wore hijabs. I guess, besides the Korean businesses here and there, the neighborhood definitely had a lot of muslims – I'm not sure what ethnicity.
The two girls seemed disconcerted by a random Korean coming up to talk to them, but after Curt explained what he was looking for, the girl thought for a moment and suggested, tentatively but with a very natural voice full of typical American teenage intonations, that there were some stores along Devon Avenue, which was nearby. Then the one, bolder girl shrugged and smiled. "Or you could just google something," she offered, dismissively brandishing her smartphone, and they walked away. It was such an obvious answer, and I think Curt felt a bit sheepish by the response. He was just trying to be socially and linguistically brave and she stated the obvious.