Auntie May teaches us about Hawaiian culture

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Lisa writes: Auntie May Parker has been a family friend since the 80s. She's always been a keeper of Hawaiian stories and traditions and more recently she became the official docent of a local history museum and cultural center. Here's Christian pounding fresh taro into poi. (Correction of my earlier impression: Fresh poi tastes like sweet potatoes and is not bad. Commercial poi is sour and not good.)
Using a shell to scrape out the meat of a slightly unripe coconut. The meat is like coconut-flavored Jello Jigglers.

Hawaiian gift wrap -- ti leaves. The gift was a bunch of papaya.

Polynesian sugar cane. This is bigger (and purpler) than the Filipino sugar cane that they grow commercially. Peel it and chew it and it's like a candy toothbrush.

Christian and I were both fascinated with this thing: It's a kukui nut lamp. The nuts are very oily and burn for about 3 minutes each. So, the ancient Hawaiians would carve these lava rock bowls (sort of like an incense holder) and string a bunch of kukui nuts on the rib of a palm frond. Light the top one and when it burns down, it will light the next one. The one pictured here would have given 15 minutes of light. She refused to light this one up for us. Auntie knows us too well.
Both of us had the same thought: "Hey, they gave us whole NECKLACES of these on Sunday, let's burn them!" We haven't actually done it. Yet.

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