A few photos of the malasadas we had in Honolulu. A malasada is a traditional Portuguese-Hawaiian deep fried pastry, similar to a donut without a hole. Leonard's Bakery, where we got these from, is sort of the canonical choice for malasadas, and it was a short walk from our hotel.
I'm posting the photos now because apparently it's Fat Tuesday today, or "Malasada Day" as it's known in Hawaii. The traditional idea, as I understand it, is that you're supposed to use up all your remaining butter and eggs and oil and so forth before Lent, and that means a big party with lots of tasty deep fried goodness, and then everyone wakes up the next day and it's 40 days of sackcloth and ashes and self denial and silly religious nonsense. The modern-day idea is that the next morning everyone wakes up with empty coral pink malasada boxes and it's time to go get more.
People often say Hawaii is generally a few years behind the mainland when it comes to trends and so forth. I don't know if that's generally true or not, but I did notice that nobody seemed to be selling bacon-wrapped malasadas. I'm quite certain that would be a license to print money, so maybe the "add bacon to everything" trend simply hasn't arrived in Hawaii yet. It's the only plausible explanation I can think of.
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and then everyone wakes up the next day and it's 40 days of sackcloth and ashes and self denial and silly religious nonsense.
Actually, it's 46 days 'cause you don't count Sundays, no one wears sackcloth because we're told to present ourselves as normal and not let folks know we're fasting, the ashes are just the first day, there's a lot of denial of selfishness, and the 'silly religious nonsense' is, of course, in the eye of the beholder (some like the chanting and the ancient rituals and the incense and the bells, some don't).
But otherwise, yeah, it's exactly like that.
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