Around world around the House

I was looking around my house today and thinking about the variety of things from around the world that we have. Most are things we have bought ourselves but some, particularly anything from Asia were bought in a shop in Australia. I have a real love for other cultures and love the variety of styles that can be found. For example, I have this (we bought this in Austria):

hung right next to this (which was bought for me for Christmas by my parents from a little Japanese shop in Cairns):

We returned from Niger (with our mission SIM) over 5 and a half years ago now and there are still a lot of Niger things around our house with no plans of putting them away any time soon. Such as these:

and these (they are actually small cards with batiks on the front that I've framed):



How could I forget this (if you are from Niger or live there you will know what it is!):

To top it all off (there's much more than the above but the post would be too big if I kept going) we have some lovley little items from our visit to the USA (bought in the town of Galena, Illinois) in 1998 such as these:

How could I complete this post without mentioning Papua New Guinea. We spent 7 weeks there in 2001 visiting my parents and we bought back quite a few nice things (they also have given us a lot!), including this pig:

Anyway, thought I'd share my love of culture. It's much more interesting to me if the item has some sort of direct connection with a culture I visit so I hope that one day we can visit Asia and south America (only been to Singapore and that was just for one day!). I've got more (deep!) to say on this subject but for now I'll let you enjoy the pretty pictures!