Secret Passage - Via Occulta - Geheimgang

[Courtenay]

For some reason, I can't help wondering if it's actually made of chocolate under that gold wrapper...

[Chrissie777]

For some reason, I can't help wondering if it's actually made of chocolate under that gold wrapper...

[Boatbuilder]

For some reason, I can't help wondering if it's actually made of chocolate under that gold wrapper...

Well, I couldn't get my teeth into it, Courtenay.

[William E]

The Nina Bawden book about a secret passage is called 'The Secret Passage.'
It is a good yarn and set at a seaside town somewhere in England. A good read but different to Blyton.
Richard Church wrote a story about exploring l natural caves. The entire story tales place in the caves.

Viv's museum had a cave theme at the start of her museum tour into the world of Blyton.

There are caves to explore in Nottingham which tell the story of the city.

Stockport has a cave system which can be explored. It became an air raid shelter in WW2,

Hastings castle has a cave passage way to the dungeons,
Lord of the Ring fans should visit the Trough of Bowland in Lancashire. It is the inspiration for middle Earth so I am told,

[Chrissie777]

William, you told me about the Richard Church book. It must be nice.
I've read a few books on how some boys in France discovered Lascaux.
In France at the river Loire we visited Loches Castle and were down in the dungeons 4 years ago.
I've been to Hastings in 1981, but didn't know about the dungeons.

[Moonraker]

What is the relevance of Geheimgang in the topic title? Sorry if I'm missing something.

[Chrissie777]

Geheimgang is the German word for secret passage, just like via occulta is the Latin word for it.

[Moonraker]

Oh right. Thanks for the explanation. I Googled the word but all I got was a snow resort in Switzerland!

[Chrissie777]

The same happened to me a few year ago when I tried to find out if I could get Steinpilze in the US (mny favorite German mushroom). They came up in Google with an abbreviation that looked like a chemical formula. Very strange!
When I tried it again a year or so later, all off a sudden they came up as porcini. Now I'll try to get porcini next fall.

[Boodi 2]

Hope you manage to get some porcini in the autumn Chrissie! Having hated mushrooms as a child I have become very fond of them in recent years...obviously my tastes have changed with age (or German mushrooms are tastier!). We went mushroom hunting about three years ago and found a great selection (including porcini), but as we are no experts (my husband had a guide to edible mushrooms with him, which he kept consulting) we were a bit nervous that we might have picked some poisonous ones by mistake, but thankfully all was well. However, since then my husband has been reluctant to repeat the proceedure, which is rather a pity, although I suppose it is better to be safe than sorry, as several years ago we heard the dreadful news that neighbours of his cousin died after eating mushrooms they had picked .

[Chrissie777]

Boodi 2, I was forced to go mushroom hunting with my mother and grandmother when I was a child and teenager and I absolutely hated doing it as it caused me back pain. As long as I can eat porcini in a restaurant, I'm o.k.. Just don't expect me to go in the woods and search for them.
In recent years we ate porcini in the Krameramtsstuben in Hamburg and at the Sababurg castle restaurant in Reinhardswald, Hessen, Germany.
Both were delicious.

[Jomo]

Our family used to go mushrooming on my uncle’s farm when we were visiting - his family would not touch them! Not because there was a chance of poisoning but because they mainly grew in cowpats. Another farmer in the same district had some extraordinary experiences after eating field picked mushrooms, I think they must have picked hallucinogenic ‘gold tops’ by mistake, that was the first time I’d heard of such a thing, apparently the farmer involved insisted that he had been captured by fairies. An interesting experience, at least they hadn’t eaten ‘white ladies of death’ and had lived to tell the tale.
The differences between these varieties are quite distinct, I don’t know how you can mistake one for another. You need to be paying attention to each and every mushroom you pick.

[Courtenay]

We used to go mushrooming when I was little too. I do know how to recognise a field mushroom (and have eaten a few that came up in our garden, and obviously lived to tell the tale!), but the ones we always hunted for as children were... well, we call them rydze, the Polish word for them (via my mum, who grew up bilingual), but the English term is saffron milk-caps. They're an orangey colour, turning green underneath if you bruise them, so they don't look very edible — I'm sure we got some strange looks from locals as we were carrying our buckets of them back to the car! — but they're safe to eat and very tasty. They grow under pine trees, of which there were many around the local golf course in Wonthaggi, near where I grew up.

Not sure how we got onto this topic from secret passages — do we have a thread on foraging that this could be moved to?

[Chrissie777]

We used to go mushrooming when I was little too. I do know how to recognise a field mushroom (and have eaten a few that came up in our garden, and obviously lived to tell the tale!), but the ones we always hunted for as children were... well, we call them rydze, the Polish word for them (via my mum, who grew up bilingual), but the English term is saffron milk-caps.

Courtenay, my mom is from Poland and always kept the Polish language alive by giving Polish language courses at the adult school in Braunschweig, Germany, until she was 70 and retired.
She tried to teach me Polish, but all I can remember is one cuss word that she used a lot when I was young and a few others like bardsowadnje and djen dobri.
Lerning English and French was a lot easier for me. I couldn't get along with the Polish letters and pronunciations.
Now my mom is 93 and still reads Polish novels. Until she was 80, she went on trips to Poland every single year, sometimes 3 times a year.

[Courtenay]

Oh, I didn't know you were half Polish like my mum, Chrissie! I only know a few words of the language myself. Mum is quite fluent, but she only spoke it at home growing up (she learned English right from when she started school as a child in Australia) and she hasn't spoken Polish regularly since her parents passed away. But a few years ago she and Dad were doing a tour of European cities and they visited Warsaw, and Mum tried speaking Polish with the locals and was delighted that they not only understood her, but said she spoke very well!

And now we're really off the topic of secret passages!