What is culture?

What is culture?! In my opinion, culture is what builds bonds between people. Take hula for example, hula is a strongly practiced culture. I have made many friends by taking hula classes. Culture is what makes a race or religion unique. The cultures practiced between a religion or a race makes them different from others cultures practiced. Culture is what makes a person unique.

A friend of mine has a culture very different from my own. Although we both live in Wai’anae, our practices are very different from each other. Seen through his families eyes, im a straight up haole. I dislike anything in the raw fish area. Whereas his family loves raw fish. Seeing through my eyes his family is very native!

One day they decided to swim to a lava rock “island” off the mountain of Lahilahi, and I decided to join them. For me I love the beach but I HATE deep water. No joke. Whenever im in the water deeper than I can touch with the tip of my toes, I start to get mini panic attacks. Mainly because I was scarred from watching JAWS 1,2,3 and 4. Now I know why my mother never liked me watching those movies. But leave it to my dad to keep it to that channel while im watching tv with him -.- So, going back to my story, we swam out to “shark island” ß nice title right? (the name freaked me out more while swimming there) and when we got to the island we picked opihi and ha’uki’uki. After our return to the house I was forced to try the ha’uki’uki and opihi. RAW. ALIVE. As Shelby scraped the poor slimy opihi out of its shell I could almost hear it screaming, “PLEASE, NO, PUT ME BACK!!” its antennas squirmed around as I bit into it. The texture of the opihi overwhelmed my mind and I could not focus on the taste. I quickly swallowed it down and drank some water. Next was the ha’uki’uki. Amazingly inside of its purple, wana-like shell, it was orange, like the color of a ripe mango in summer. But it didn’t taste anything like a mango. It was salty and had a crunchy texture due to its pieces of broken shell. I quickly swallowed it down, and was happy I was done J.

Thinking about it now, im glad I tried a culture different from my own. So, culture is a practice that not everyone may enjoy but its good to try new things, right?