Wild food
Went mushrooming yesterday, on the edge of the Dandenongs. My Polish aunt A. decided that the season was right, and the weather gracefully obliged. We set out with a mission: if we couldn't find enough Suillus luteus, Christmas 2009 was off! I didn't know this before, but A. explained that, in Poland, the liturgical season of Advent -- like Lent
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T. and I were in Görlitz / Zgorzelec on Easter Sunday. You could spot the Poles by their slightly-too smartly-dressed appearance and general sense of occasion.
Catholic Europe, eh. Similarly, in Luzern, the Easter before last, I was amazed by how much Easter was celebrated as a public occasion - can't remember if I wrote about it on LJ at the time. There were Easter-themed shop window decorations, 'Easter' baby animals in the market for children to pet, florists had special Easter floral decorations for the home, etc. Naturally, I enjoyed this very much; for me there was a sense of cultural familiarity and even a kind of "homecoming" that I don't often experience in Australia, certainly not in the context of the public sphere (our normative cultural Christianity is somehow not culturally Catholic).
Although, when I mentioned the "smartly-dressed, Southern European-looking couple", I was thinking they looked Italian, rather than Polish. I know mushroom-hunting is pretty common across Europe, but it's something I associate particularly with Italians.
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