Photo Friday 'Heat'

This week's PF theme is 'heat'. Living in Perth means that heat is a part of life. In summer itusually gets to around 42C (thats nearly 108F), sometimes a little higher and usually for a few days in a row. Sometimes we have a heat wave where this last for a week or more. This summer wasn't too bad. I'm not posting about Perth though because the hottest we ever experienced was in Niger, West Africa.

I'm fairly sure we had days where the temp got up to 50C (thats 122F). When we went to Papua New Guinea on our way home someone commented that we didn't look very 'brown' for people who'd lived in such temperatures. There's a reason for that. When its 50C outside you don't really go and bask in it and try to get a tan (well, we didn't anway). Besides, two words.....skin cancer.

Anyway, this photo is from the heat we experienced in Africa back in 2000-2001 (spot the giraffe by the way) and the second shot shows just how 'white' we really were afterwards!

Niger, West Africa

Papua New Guinea (notice the volcanic soil!)

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!

Slide Night

A little while ago I volunteered to take all of my Nanna's slides off her hands. She didn't want them anymore and didn't care what I did with them. There's a lot. There are 16 round slide wheels and four little straight ones. Each round one has 120 slides in it and each straight one has around 40 slides.

Why did I want them? Mainly because I didn't want her to throw them away. These slides are the record of my grandparents travels around Australia. From the amount of slides (someone can calculate how many that equals) you can see that they travelled a lot!

Tonight we all sat down and went through four wheels and two straight ones. It was amazing to see where they went, what they discovered, how they got there etc... We had a few laughs as we discovered a whole pile of photos of my parents and my brother and I years ago. There were shots from Mum and Dad's wedding, from when I was a newborn and then when my brother was newborn. The best part was being able to compare myself with Keziah at a similar age. Now I can see where she gets that frown from and that smirk!

The strangest part is that there were photos of myself that I'd never seen before, for some reason thats a strange feeling. It was fun anyway to turn off the teli and have a laugh. Just 14 boxes of slides to go!

PS. I've got big plans for the slides that are just scenery - look out for that appearing on here one day.