Fat Thursday

 

 
 
 
 

It’s a damp and chilly morning as I head off to my local branch of Warsaw’s excellent Cieślikowski bakery to pick up as many of their delicious pączki as I can lay my hands on. I am expecting a queue so I have a book with me to read while I wait patiently to be served. At home, my family are eagerly awaiting the goodies. But when I get to the store, surprise surprise – there is no queue. I am later than usual, and have missed the commuter rush, but the shelves are bare of pączki, so I may have to wait for another delivery, fresh from the off-site ovens. But no, one of the staff comes from the back room with three trays of the things and starts re-stacking the shelves. There are plenty for everyone. The one person ahead of me picks up her order, two trays with several wrapped packages that contain I estimate 100 pączki – for the office I assume. I am served next, and order my paltry – but still delicious – 10, pay for them and head home happily. Donut Day today has arrived again and my supplies are in.

Donut Day is the popular name for the delightful Polish festival known as TŁUSTY CZWARTEK - in English, Fat Thursday. It falls on the third Thursday in February, when the days are getting longer – it’s light before 7 a.m. and remains so until about 6 p.m. - and the traditional long cold winter is coming to an end. Tradition says it’s time to celebrate this by eating as many pączki as possible, and with their usual enthusiasm Poles tuck in with gusto. It means a little less now, because the long cold winters have given way to shorter milder ones, thanks to the non-existent global warming and fake climate change (that’s if you believe clowns like Trump and my mate Nick and the other deniers) and the goodies are baked on an industrial scale in bakeries the length and breadth of the country rather than in your own kitchen, but it remains possibly the most popular feast day here. I heard from an English mate of mine one year, telling me his wife (a Polish lady) had gone out early and bought 48 pączki for the family of four, and he was at that moment enjoying three, warmed, with his breakfast coffee. I like his style!

Pączki are Polish donuts. They are not the rings with a hole in the middle, deep fried and sprinkled with sugar powder or iced with a variety of flavours (mainly chocolate and vanilla) and sprinkled with chocolate chips, so beloved by Homer Simpson. Nothing like Dunkin’ Donuts at all. Pączki are fat and filling and stuffed with jam or marmalade and baked in a hot oven, then iced or covered in powdered sugar. Served warm, you bite into them and there is an exquisite explosion of sweetness in the mouth….truly scrumptious. I’ve eaten similar donuts in a variety of places from a number of bakeries and patisseries, and none can compare with Cieślikowski’s. They are just superb. Sold all the year round, they are a favourite treat for Polish families everywhere, and the Donut Day festival is a fitting tribute to Polish tradition.  And cuisine.

I love it.

A Change of Plan

So......back at the end of 2019 - it seems so long ago now! - I mothballed this blog.  I needed a change, to try something different.  And also because as I settled into retirement and my income plummetted from Funny Money to a Small Beer Pension it became obvious that my travelling days, at least for the time being, had ground to a halt. From averaging two flights a week, the norm since the turn of the Millennium, I was now looking at 2 a year (maybe half a dozen in a good year), and those really all to England.  Difficult to keep up the interest on that number, now my globe-trotting days had been consigned to history.  I still intended to write, and indeed have, but the blog content expanded to cover health issues, politics, more cultural stuff like book and music and movie revviews: very different.  I lumped it all together on a new blog, This World, This Life (https://travellin-bob2.blogspot.com), with a different appearance (that I changed twice before being satisfied) and carried on writing).

Long Covid has made creativity a challenge, as the condition invariably affects concentration (not to put too fine a point on it, it can fuck up your brain completely) amongst other things, and the effects can last months or even years.  It's taken me close to four years to get back to something like normality and be able to focus on reading and writing anything bigger than a shopping list or a WhatsApp message, but I'm at the point now where I NEED to do this.  So I've decided to resurrect this channel, and from now on it will contain only travel stuff (as befits a title like The World According to Travellin' Bob, with an airplane window view of clouds and a wingtip as its background image). The non-travel stuff will remain where it is, on This World....  Right now, I'm busy migrating all the travel content across (and no doubt updating some of it) and it will publish here over the next few days.  I hope to get that process done in a week, so there will be bits popping up every day - starting now. 

After that......well,  let's see how it goes......