Sorry, Honey, It's Fat Thursday, or: "Taters or Fries?"

Today is what they call "Fat Thursday" in Poland (alternate translation: "Greasy Thursday," or, if translating from Bavarian or Swiss German dialects, "Dirty Thursday"), kind of like what we call "Fat Tuesday" in the West, but without quite the same connotations of bacchanalia and bachelor-party style baroque excess-- it's just a day when you're supposed to eat several doughnuts, not your last chance to commit every sin in the book. After all, Lent doesn't start until next Wednesday-- so when we have our Fat Tuesday, they have what's called The Night of the Herring, which often involves alcohol and other devilment as well as the fish of great and deserved renown.

I'm not planning to eat any doughnuts today-- I've had enough Fat Thursdays lately to last me a while. Every time I go to the Viennese Bar to have a cutlet or a filet o' fish and a soup and salad, they ask "Taters or fries?" Not in the intonation that allows for a third possibility (i.e., nothing). The fact that the soup itself, no matter what soup it is, contains several large lumps of potato somehow doesn't change their view that one has to have a few more, fatter lumps, fried or drenched in butter of course, on the side.