What we perceive as a different cuture varies as we grow. The more experience that a person has with one culture helps him understand another culture and think of them as not so different from his own. If some person lived with a Chinese person, for example, he might not think of their culture as new and different if her were to travel to China for a while. But, If a person didn't know anything about this different culture, he might think that going to this place would be an exotic adventure into the unknown.

A different culture that I have experienced is the Hawaiian culture. When going there, I saw new and different things that I personally thought were the coolest things I had ever seen. Things like a pig roasting on an open fire, or the people's idea that sixty degree weather was cold. These where things that surprised me when I went there for the first time, but don't surprise me now, since I've been there a few more times. But when I was first there, everything about their culture seemed totally different from the culture that I experienced living in the little town of Belingham, Washington.

The people in Hawaii dressed in very little clothing, as it was warm eleven out of the twelve months in the year. The people who lived there were friendly to the tourists for some reason, even though these tourists were annoying the heck out of them. Everything you saw in the city was designed with tourists in mind. All the signs telling people the obvious and the millions of gift shops that lined the streets are just a couple examples of this. But once a person gets down under all of the tourist attractions and into the real culture, he finds the thousands of years of past that is still hanging around. You get to understand exactly what the leis were for, where the hula dancers came from, and why they roast pigs over a fire and then bury them.

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