It was fun, although I could not really keep up the same level of enthusiasm for mushrooms as the other participants. I noticed I thought to myself “how can they be so crazy about mushrooms? It’s really silly. Now, if we were looking at soils, I would be much more interested for a much longer time span. Hmm. Perhaps other people think that is silly too ….”.
However, I took some great pictures of mushrooms, and I can now tell a few genera apart. I never knew mushrooms could be this pretty, but then I learned that NZ has some really crazy mushrooms in terms of bright colours. In fact, as Ian likes to tell, NZ is the only country in the world that has a money bill with a mushroom on it. This in the category of unusual and useless information.
yep this is a mushroom, called something like the purple potato bag. At first we thought it was chewing gum. Later Ian told me "I once mistook chewing gum for a mushroom". Eeew.
It was also the first time ever that someone noticed a hint of a Canadian accent in my English. She stopped me mid-sentence to ask “Are you Canadian? No? Hmm, your “o” sounded Canadian”. I took it as a compliment.
Talking about Canadian: I met 4 Canadians so far here in NZ, and all four of them told me this: “I have never been so cold in my life as here in NZ”. And they all came from pretty cold parts of Canada too. It is the lack of decent heating that drives even the most hardened Canadian insane here apparently.
At first I wasn't really into the mushroom hing and got tired of meeting 10 new people again every day, but after the first day I noticed I wasn't the only complete beginner in identifying mushrooms, there were a few PhD students who would occasionally talk about other things than mushrooms, and the places we went to to search mushrooms were beautiful. The weather was gorgeous too. Bad for mushroom picking (too dry), but that didn’t bother me.
So in the end I didn’t really want to go back to normal work, but of course had to.
Talking about Canadian: I met 4 Canadians so far here in NZ, and all four of them told me this: “I have never been so cold in my life as here in NZ”. And they all came from pretty cold parts of Canada too. It is the lack of decent heating that drives even the most hardened Canadian insane here apparently.
At first I wasn't really into the mushroom hing and got tired of meeting 10 new people again every day, but after the first day I noticed I wasn't the only complete beginner in identifying mushrooms, there were a few PhD students who would occasionally talk about other things than mushrooms, and the places we went to to search mushrooms were beautiful. The weather was gorgeous too. Bad for mushroom picking (too dry), but that didn’t bother me.
So in the end I didn’t really want to go back to normal work, but of course had to.
And let's not forget, there were sheep.
