There’s Culture Everywhere | How to See What’s Been Around You All Along

I want you to try something tomorrow morning.

From the moment you leave your front door until you get to wherever you’re going; work, school, the gym, the store, count how many different cultures you encounter along the way. Not on a trip overseas. Not in a documentary. Just on your normal, everyday route.

I promise the number will surprise you.

Because the truth is, most of us are surrounded by more culture than we’ll ever realize. We just stopped looking.

Your Morning Commute Is a World Tour

Think about the streets you drive down every day. Really think about them.

There’s the Vietnamese phở shop on the corner that opens at 6 AM because in Vietnam, phở is a breakfast food, not a lunch or dinner dish like most Americans assume. The owner isn’t just selling soup. She’s carrying forward a tradition that started with street vendors in Hanoi over a hundred years ago. Every bowl she serves has a century of history in it.

There’s the Ethiopian restaurant with the injera bread you’ve seen through the window but never tried. That bread is made from teff, a grain that’s been cultivated in the Ethiopian highlands for thousands of years. Eating with your hands from a shared plate isn’t just how the food is served, it’s a communal act called gursha, where feeding someone else by hand is one of the deepest expressions of love and friendship in Ethiopian culture.

There’s the Indian grocery store with shelves of spices you can’t name. Each one of those jars tells a story about trade routes that connected continents, about grandmothers who taught their daughters how much turmeric to add by feel, about a country where the food changes every hundred miles because the land and the people change with it.

That’s just your drive to work. You haven’t even gotten out of the car yet.

The Culture in Your Kitchen

Open your pantry right now. I’ll wait.

Chances are you’re looking at a map of the world and don’t even know it. The rice came from a tradition that stretches back over 9,000 years to the Yangtze River in China. The pasta traces to Italian craftsmanship that turned simple flour and water into an art form. The hot sauce in your fridge has roots in the Caribbean, West Africa, Central America, or Louisiana, each one with a completely different story about how peppers became the foundation of a cuisine.

The coffee you drink every morning? That’s a gift from Ethiopia, where legend says a goat herder named Kaldi noticed his goats dancing after eating certain berries. From there, coffee traveled through Yemen, across the Ottoman Empire, into European coffeehouses that sparked revolutions, and eventually into the cup sitting on your counter right now.

Your kitchen isn’t just a room. It’s a crossroads of civilizations.

The Music You Hear Without Listening

Pay attention to the sounds around you this week. Not just your playlist, the sounds of your environment.

The reggaeton playing from the car next to you at the stoplight carries the DNA of Panamanian reggae en español, Puerto Rican bomba, Jamaican dancehall, and American hip-hop all fused into something new. The Afrobeats song that just popped up on your streaming playlist is part of a Nigerian and Ghanaian musical movement that’s taken over the global charts, blending Yoruba rhythms with modern production in a way that makes people on every continent move.

The jazz playing in the coffee shop exists because enslaved Africans brought their musical traditions to New Orleans and fused them with European instruments. The blues, rock and roll, R&B, hip-hop, gospel all of it traces back to that cultural collision. Every time you tap your foot to a beat, you’re participating in a cultural story that spans continents and centuries.

Music doesn’t just cross borders. It erases them.

The People Next Door

Here’s what I’ve noticed about most neighborhoods: we live next to people from different cultures every single day, and we never ask them about it.

Your neighbor who takes her shoes off at the door isn’t just being tidy. In many Asian, Middle Eastern, and Scandinavian cultures, shoes carry the outside world’s dirt, literally and symbolically, and the home is a sacred, clean space. The family down the street whose house smells incredible every Friday evening might be preparing for Shabbat, a weekly Jewish tradition of rest and togetherness that’s been practiced for thousands of years. The guy at the barbershop who always has Caribbean music playing and calls everyone “boss” or “brother” is expressing a warmth rooted in island culture where community isn’t optional, it’s survival.

These aren’t exotic observations from a travel show. This is your block. Your strip mall. Your break room at work. The world came to you. The question is whether you’re paying attention.

How to Start Seeing It

Seeing culture everywhere isn’t a skill you need to learn. It’s a habit you need to build. And like any habit, it starts with small, intentional actions.

Next time you eat something, ask yourself where it came from. Not the store, the culture. Who invented this dish? Why these ingredients? What was happening in that part of the world that made people cook this way?

Next time you hear a word or phrase you don’t recognize, don’t let it pass. Look it up. Ask about it. Language is the most direct window into how a culture thinks, there are words in other languages that describe feelings, experiences, and ideas that English doesn’t even have a word for.

Next time you’re at a gathering and someone does something differently than you would, resist the urge to judge it. Get curious instead. Ask them about it. Most people love being asked about their traditions. It tells them that who they are matters to someone outside their own community.

And next time you look at your own life; your family’s habits, your holiday traditions, the way your parents raised you, recognize that those things are cultural too. You’re not just “normal.” You’re the product of a specific cultural story, and that story is just as fascinating as anyone else’s.

This Is What We’re Building

When I say “there’s culture everywhere,” it’s not just a tagline. It’s a lens. It’s a way of moving through the world with your eyes open, your curiosity turned on, and your assumptions turned down.

Cultural Appreciation was built on this idea. Every piece of content we create, every product we design, every story we tell is meant to help you see what’s been around you all along. We’re not here to make culture feel academic or distant. We’re here to make it feel alive, because it is.

You don’t need to fly anywhere. You don’t need to spend anything. You just need to walk outside and look.

The phở shop. The spice aisle. The music in the parking lot. The way your coworker celebrates a holiday you’ve never heard of. The story behind the fabric pattern on your favorite shirt.

It’s all culture. It’s all connected. And it’s all worth appreciating.

There is culture everywhere. Once you start seeing it, you can’t stop.

— Kenyatta

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