Lucky you

All I get here is saltwater fishing and duck/deer hunting if I had a firearm. But all three are boring. My passion is freshwater fishing. Namely, finding a creek (small river) and settling down for a nice quiet spot on the shore, with reeds and still water... Ahh, I can almost feel those many times I have done that in Russia... Somehow, it is not same here in the South of US. The forests are atrocious too. Not the varied, deciduous, non-coniferous, beautiful and somehow strangely comfortable deep forests of Eastern Europe. In here, the forests are a monotonous tangle. Even in the North, it is not the same. I dunno, but there is something special about Eastern European forests, something I have seen in Western European forests as well. Partially, it is the familiarity, but still... Oh the nostalgia...

And most of all, I love mushroom hunting in the autumn. There are hundreds of varieties of edible mushrooms in Eastern Europe, and all are very distinct and graceful. All have their nicknames their special places where you can find them. You also have the rare and valuable mushrooms, such as the prized belyi grib (the unusually large and thick white mushroom - that is also what its name translates to) or the yaziki (a very peculiar fungi which grows in moist, large holes in the wood of the bottom of large trees - the fungi itself is red and slimy on the top - its name in Russian means 'tongue' - which it resembles in all respects. The fungus is very tasty, though, and is usually the size of an medium-large laptop screen).

This is sort of what I mean by a European forest: