Dongbei day #3 - Mushrooms

The first thing you notice when you go into Beiji cun is the mushrooms. They're outside every building in the process of drying, covering old newspapers, sheets of carboard, whatever happens to be handy for mushroom drying. There's obviously been a lot of work done by the locals to pick so many mushrooms. Asking around, I found out that a half kilogram of dried mushrooms sells for 40 kuai. Evidently, that makes them worth picking because they were everywhere. I remembered on the bus ride up, we had made a stop on the side of the road to pick up a couple of mushroom pickers with baskets overflowing. Apparently the mushrooms can be picked anywhere around Beiji cun, especially in the woods.

The first day there, in that hurried lunch with Ma Jainbo, we had a plate and they were delicious. I think they're Shiitake mushrooms, at least most of them. There are a few different kinds, but the locals called them all the same thing so I'm not sure. Later that day, I looked at the mushrooms drying in the street, looked at the woods surrounding Beiji cun, and decided I wanted to go mushroom picking.

The next day, I hopped on the bus back to Mohe, but this time I would be getting off with the mushroom pickers. The owner of the bus and room I was staying in also went with us to "protect" me, in yet another gesture of hospitality. Hospitality is a good thing, but so is a nice warm blanket until someone's using it to cut of your air supply. I can't seem to go a day here without someone new taking me under their wing, buying me things, accompanying me places, speaking for me, and making suggestions that are difficult to refuse. At times I wish I couldn't speak the language so I'd be free to just smile, nod, and walk away.

However, the mushroom picking was really great. I'd bought a mosquito hat and a cheap pair of shoes on the advice of some of the veteran pickers. The shoes saved my expensive American ones from getting dirty, and in the end the mosquito hat was also a really good idea, for obvious reasons. It was nice just to get out in the woods after being in Harbin for so long. There's nothing like getting a reminder that there's nature outside of all the traffic, classrooms, and tour bus television sets. We had about 4 hours, and just started hiking into the woods from the road. We all had big baskets like I'd seen the day before, and I was soon on the way to filling it. The mushrooms were not too tough to find. I'd walk for a few minutes, scanning the ground, and then find a patch of them usually by a stump or log. There were also red berries that we could eat. I think I should know their English name but I don't. The plants were very short and blanketed the ground in some places. The berres looked like huckleberries or blueberries but they were red, and tart. Not bad.

One section of forest had the most enormous ant hills I've ever seen. I think I've said it before, the woods in this area are a whole lot like the ones in the pacific northwest, a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees and a lot of other familiar sights. The ants were also familiar. I remember the ant hill out behind the pond at the Ranch. When we were little, the cousins all thought it was huge and we'd go out and poke it and run away. I think it really was pretty big, maybe three or four feet tall. Not compared to these Chinese ant hills. The biggest one was over my head, maybe six feet and a few inches, and as big around as it was tall. That was the biggest, but it wasn't the only one. I'd say I saw between ten and fifteen of these enormous things, all over 5 feet tall. That's not to mention the other little guys. Unfortunately, the ant hill section was also the best mushrom section so we ended up staying there quite a while. Let me tell you, it was a little scary to walk, along scanning the ground intently for mushrooms, then look up and see that the huge form in my peripheral vision wasn't a tree at all but a writhing mound of biting insects. They were red ants, the same as we have back home, so at least I knew they weren't going to really attack and kill me like those rainforest ants I've seen on TV. All the same, it wasn't fun to find them crawling from the mushrooms onto my hands, unhappy to have their territory invaded.

By the time the bus came back through and picked us up I'd filled my basket. The others with me had filled their much larger baskets along with their hats and bags. At first I consoled myself by thinking that they were veteran mushroom pickers and just had more experience, but it turns out that it was the bus owner's second time picking and the other woman's third. I guess the more experienced pickers were the ones that had gone right when we'd gone left. I never found out how much they'd picked, and it's a good thing because I'd definitely just be even more humiliated.

That night, which is actually last night, the bus owner treated me and a few others staying in his small hotel to dinner. This is where Chinese and Americans really differ. In America I can see a local making friends with a traveler, maybe treating him to a few beers and a meal or two - maybe - but the guy running your travel services is NEVER going to give you free dinner when he could make a few more bucks. I feel smothered all the time by the hospitality over here, but the generosity is truly awe-inspiring. The dinner he cooked included our fresh mushrooms, and they were even more delicious than the ones I'd eaten the day before.