The Art of Mushroom Hunting

Well, a lot has happened since the last post but I since my internet access is still pretty limited, I haven't been able to update the blog. Or check my email. Or Facebook. Or find out who won the U.S. Open. Right now I'm writing this from a McDonalds in the center of St. Petersburg before I need to go to my Russian lesson in a few hours. I bought a small chocolate milkshake so I wouldn't feel bad about using their Wi-Fi.

I still don't have my camera--It was in fact left under my friends' couch in Finland and I'll hopefully have it back in about two weeks. I have friends going to Finland next week and so a hand-off has been arranged.

Last weekend I participated in a major Russian pastime. While Americans spend their weekends in the fall watching college football, Russian go to the forest to pick mushrooms. Yes, you read that correctly. Last Saturday morning at an insanely early hour, seven of my friends (Masha, Masha, Kostya, Sasha, Olya, Dima, and Polina, to be exact) piled into two cars and drove about an hour outside of St. Petersburg. This whole area is very densely forested and in the late-summer and autumn months there are lots of mushrooms that sprout up. The locals then INVADE the forests to wipe them clean of any edible mushroom.

Suffice it to say that I learned way more about mushrooms than I ever thought possible last Saturday. I learned how to tell between the bad ones and the good ones, what colors to be looking for, the names of all of the different varieties (none of which I would know in English), and that, like in fishing, if you're too loud then you scare the mushrooms away.

At the beginning of our hunt I'll admit that I thought it was all a bit silly, but then I found my first mushroom. I was hooked after that. After about four or five hours of scanning the forest for every possibly edible fungi, we all went back to St. Petersburg and after surviving insane drivers and absolutely ridiculous traffic jams to get back to the city, we cleaned up, chopped up, and cooked up all the mushrooms and had a feast.

I still don't really like to EAT mushrooms, but I am now a full-fledged fan of searching for mushrooms.

On another note, I now (finally) have a place to live. I am renting a room from a family I know from church in the southwest corner of the city. Right now there are six people living in the apartment representing three generations overall and tomorrow my landlady's daughter-in-law is flying in from Scotland for two months. (Her husband is getting his Ph.D. in Scotland but she is finishing up her Master's degree here in St. Pete so she comes to Russia a few months out of the year.) Seven people in one apartment MIGHT seem a bit ridiculous but because Russians are accustomed to living in cozy conditions, it works out quite well.

Either today or tomorrow I'll be buying a mini internet modem that will allow me to have internet access wherever I go with my laptop so now I'll be able to update my blog more often. And check my email. And Facebook. Now to find out who won the US Open...