4. Mushroom Picking: what a Pastime!

If there is one thing you do not do, it’s make fun of a country’s national pastime. A person may poke fun silently, but never aloud. If a visitor to England dared to mock our fondness for watching boat races or judge our love of an afternoon drink up, well

I would probably the country if I told someone this dirty secret, but I hate mushrooms. I find it mad that not only do the Czechs love eating a dodgy fungus, but they center an entire national pastime on pulling them out of the ground. So in my whole life I never thought that I would utter the phrase “I am

But that is exactly what we were going to do.

So I found myself on a train one very early morning heading to a place I couldn’t pronounce for my life. It’s called Říčany. We were asked to go on this excursion by our neighbors Zdenek and his wife and, since our son had become mates with their son, we thought it would be nice to do. Emma knows that I hate mushrooms, so she told me that I could back out if I wanted. But I decided to tag along to check it out as a sociological experiment.

The primary adjective to describe mushrooming is boring. It consisted of carrying a basket, being very quiet, walking around the forest, and looking at the ground. When I found my first mushroom I was amused. Then when I came across another one, I found myself rather chuffed. I hate to admit it, but when I came upon a cluster of them underneath a log, I was downright excited. Long before we regrouped at the meeting place my basket was filled with a heaping pile of mushrooms.

Zdenek was a little jealous, and said it was just beginner’s luck. His wife was nicer about it and said I had an inherent talent for mushrooming. Either way, I sort of shotmyself in the foot since we were invited for fried mushrooms later that evening and I had to eat mushrooms all night. Might not be the best food ever, but, afterall, mushrooming is a quite amusing pastime.