2009 Fair Update:  This year’s 40th Annual Fungus Fair will be held at the Lawrence Hall of Science, in Berkeley (map).  This great event takes place on December 5th-6th, from 10am-5pm on each day.

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Just picked up the buzz about the Fungus Fair!

This weekend, the Oakland Museum and Mycological Society of San Francisco are hosting the 39th Annual Fungus Fair.  Local mycologists collect specimens throughout the Bay Area, and this is the “go-to” event to put your hands on some specimens  – and otherwise revel in nature’s oddities.

Take a break from the more mundane, and visit the fungus among us.  The Oakland Museum’s (map) hours are:   Saturday from 10am-6pm; and Sunday from 12pm-5pm.  Daily admission is $8/general and $5/students, and kids under 5 are free.

The fair schedule is packed with lectures, demonstrations and even entertainment along with exhibits.  Kids can make mushroom ice cream (ugh), create jewelry, play with clay models and take home a fungus-growing kit.

The lecture line-up also sounds great, covering everything from reproduction to magic medicine.  Various cooking and mushroom-dying demos will take place both days.  For pure entertainment, there’s a topical movie called  Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People.

Anyway, it’s worth a quick trip to see the ‘shrooms alone, like Maryjane’s picks from last year.  Some of the specimens look like cousins of what we buy at the farmer’s market, while others seem sort of disgusting to me.  Do you see the “hairy” looking ones above?  Or the one that resembles a cow pie?

I’ll never be a mycologist (!) but love the edibles and look forward to the weekend festivities.  However if you can’t make the Fungus Fair, then pay a virtual visit to MykoWeb – it’s an amazing resource, put together by a former president of San Francisco’s Mycological Society.