Guarantee if you’re from somewhere — Chicago, New York, Portland, Australia — we have an aunty or cousin from there, or know someone that lives there, even if it’s not really where you’re from. “Oh, you stay Chicago? My cousin lives Chicago. He lives Michigan.”
No one uses the cardinal directions here. Things are mauka side (mountain side), makai side (ocean side), Waikiki side (east) or Ewa side (west).
Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Micronesian, Polynesian, Hawaiian, Caucasian, Spanish, Portuguese…The list goes on and on. Many Hawaii locals are a combination of the aforementioned races, and a common question is “So what are you?”
“Which high school you when grad from?” The answer tells us loads about where you’re from, who you know, what you know and everything in between.
There’s nothing wrong with visiting Waikiki — if you’re on vacation or forced to venture there for some god-forsaken reason. We like our beaches a little less crowded.
Aloha Friday is our weekly holiday celebrated when work is “pau” (finished) and the weekend fun can begin. Radio personalities happily exclaim, “Happy Alooooohaaaa Friday!” and a box of pork hash or manapua is usually waiting for us at the office Friday mornings.
People start carrying around their tissues, wearing their wind breakers, and lamenting about how they are going to “catch cold” when the weather drops below 75 degrees.
Island life is rich and varied in many ways, but the traffic situation is definitely a time-suck. Rush-hour commute, though not as bad as the mainland, can easily suck up hours of your day, if not completely ruin your evening if there’s a bad accident or the zipper lane machine breaks.
When the volcanic fog (vog) blows over to Honolulu from Pu’u O’o in Volcano National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii, the weather is “junk.” Any possible ailment you might have is most definitely due to it.
Just because we’re a small chain of islands in the middle the Pacific Ocean doesn’t mean we don’t have 5G, Wi-Fi, cable and all the other amenities.
Forget mashed potatoes, or bread for that matter. The starch of choice, and we live or die by it, is rice. If you’re trying to be healthy, you’ll opt for brown, but white’s the staple. If you can’t decide between the two, you can choose “hapa” which is a brown rice/white rice mix.
The Spam Jam is an annual festival celebrating our beloved canned meat. Vendors reincarnate Spam into more than just musubis, which are teriyaki-marinated spam on top of rice wrapped in seaweed, for all to enjoy.
For people from the mainland, traveling around 10 miles or more to get anywhere is standard. In Hawaii, if anything is more than 10 miles away, it’s usually too far for us.
In general, everywhere in Honolulu is considered “town.” Everywhere outside of Honolulu is not town. “I’m going to town to go Costco” said no local ever.
Tourists come and go, but we locals live here every day. We bond like a family, or ohana, and live aloha with one another the best we know how. That’s how we keep Hawaii paradise for us and for our out-of- towners. 