He probably does live in the middle of nowhere. I live near DC now (and lived in Germany for 3 years) and run into the same types of places you mention - ethni

He probably does live in the middle of nowhere. I live near DC now (and lived in Germany for 3 years) and run into the same types of places you mention - ethnic stores and restaurants of all persuasions. However, I grew up in Arkansas and you'd be surprised how homogenous it was. In some of the bigger towns (I'm talking >10k) you might start to find ethnic restaurants, for example, but I rarely saw anything else you could call ethnic. So while your experience is common for the larger cities and urbanized areas of the US, I would wager for vast swathes of the rural areas of the country the experience is more like my time in Arkansas.