Going to the Country, Going to Pick a lot of Mushrooms> Expated

This past weekend I went with some friends for a weekend out of town in a small village 2 and a half hours from Prague. There we camped, went to a party for Blacksmiths and picked mushrooms. Allow me to elaborate. We began the trip with Kyra, Nate, Katka and I on a bus playing 20 questions across several rows of non-descript, somewhat interested Czechs. The best answers:
"Wind shield wiper"
"That thing that breaks the glass on a bus when it flips over"
"A first base coach"
"Djibouti"
"Kyra's Belly"
"Two Iains in a wheat egg"

The bus took us to a Karlovy Vary, an old Czech spa town. If you ever wanted to find a lot of old Russian women drinking urine flavored natural mineral water in square-ish shaped ceramic mugs with handles that double as straws, well, you are a sick freak. Oh and this is the place for you. There was lots of nice looking architecture, spigots with different tasting and temperatured water and tourists. Ummm...tourists.

From there we took a train to this small village where we went to some small castle for a blacksmith party. I wish I could say that those blacksmiths know how to party, but to be honest, I am not sure they do. For many, many too many hours, two different blacksmiths would heat and bend pieces of metal, surrounded by a crowd of onlooking blacksmiths and well-wishers while ABBA and Simon and Garfunkel blared in the background. Don't these guys know that blacksmiths are tough and that tough people do not listen to Simon and Garfunkel. Oh, they also dress as pirates.

From there we went to a friends house and camped in his backyard for the night. The next morning we woke up and went mushroom hunting. Apparently this is a very Czech thing to do. You basically wander around forests and find wild growing mushrooms and try your best not to poison yourself and the one's you love/like/loke. Mediocre times! After a long day in the forest we caught a train back to Prague and went to a friends house for some mushroom soup, made from the day's haul. Nobody died or got sick so all in all the mushroom hunt was a winner.