Sunt ciuperci

There will be 3 of them today and they come with a story…so one of my Russian students said to me on our last class something like this:

(Me) – Ce mai faci?
(Him) – Sunt ciuperci!

Now I am a very visual person and he could feel a big “what…tf” on my faceand I said maybe you meant “Sunt varză”, he actually said that his colleagues thought him this expression, apparently they teach him the worst ones somehow, one was “Ce faci, frumoaso?”, who should not sound that bad but it does!
So I said to my student that we have indeed expressions even with mushrooms but this is not one of them, thus let’s take a look at the wonderful “ciuperci”
Doar n-am mâncat ciuperci = doar n-am înnebunit…which in English would be “I’m not crazy!”
📚📚📚 Pagubă-n ciuperci = nu e nimic, puțin îmi pasă, “no big deal, I don’t care”
📚📚📚 A apărea ca ciupercile după ploaie – a apărea în număr mare și în timp scurt, to basically multiply a lot and in a short time.
Now there is no real etimology I could find here except that the word comes from Bulgarian, even I am impressed by this finding.
But I found a pretty nice explanation though, someone on the net defined “pagubă-n ciuperci” in terms of our lands potential to have lots of mushrooms in the forests, as it was a free product you could find in a forest, especially after the rain, it would not be such a big problem if you don’t – you basically did not lose anything, and of course not won anything.
The other “a apărea ca ciupercile după ploaie”, is in my opinion a very logic one. Not sure if you have ever experienced going in a forest just to pick up mushrooms…I did and I was very unssuccessful but that is not very relevant here…but if you have there is a big tendency for them to appear in a bigger number after rain. Now in the figurative way, we use it especially when we see a all of a sudden very big increase in the number of, let’s say, banks or chemist’s in Romania.
Eg.1 – Cred că l-am văzut pe Mihai în magazin.
– Ce ai tu? E în Germania
– Doar n-am mâncat ciuperci, sigur era el dar, s-a prefăcut că nu mă vede.
Eg. 2 – Te-ai mai îngrășat!
– Ei nu mai spune, pagubă-n ciuperci. Nu am observat, nu am oglindă acasă.
Eg. 3 – Casele de jocuri de noroc au apărut ca ciupercile după ploaie.
– Așa e, cum de ajung unii să-și piardă și casele așa!