SHROOMS!!!

Not all of you know this, but I have a true passion for mushrooms – not the eating of them, though I do like eating them – but I’m fascinated by their colors, textures, and shapes. Different types can grow right next to each other. I like finding them and taking pictures of them and seeing photos of them taken by others. They just blow my mind!

You can imagine I was in absolute heaven last weekend when I attended the annual mushroom festival in a small town near me. There was an exhibit of about one hundred varieties of mushrooms found in this area of Catalunya. They were marked as edible, inedible, toxic, and VERY toxic. This is the time of year Catalans go to the woods with their baskets to collect edible (hopefully) mushrooms. Check out the colors!

Some of the names of the mushrooms below are descriptive, such as “devil’s egg,” “soft wolf fart,” “donkey’s ear,” “narrow rat’s foot,” and “pine cauliflower”…

And my favorite name is velvety relative killer (as in parent, sibling, etc.), below. The ones to the right look like little men!

Educational posters at the exhibit show which mushrooms to avoid and which are most poisonous.

The festival itself was a typical Catalan party with food and wine and music and dancing. It was THE BEST day ever! Sublime.

The band played “Country Roads” (a John Denver song) in Catalan…and then of course, there was the traditional Catalan dance, the Sardana, where everyone makes a big circle (it was a really big circle) and dances and sings. Oh, and check out this old hippie (on the bottom)!

I know this has been a long post but this day was so fun and so much the epitome of why I love being here. I actually cried a couple of times just because I was so happy. And because I’m such a mushroom nerd, I bought a book about mushrooms in Catalunya and the author signed it!

I found out later that I appeared three times in a local news report on the festivities. Once I was caught running past the camera trying not to be interviewed!

The night before the mushroom festival (it was a weekend of culture!), I attended my second Carmen Amaya festival in Begur celebrating a famous female flamenco dancer who lived her final years here. This was a “jazz” flamenco group with a keyboard and drums, which is not traditional, but very fun!

Reporting from Sant Sadurní de l’Heura…