How to survive a Polish wedding feast

A friend warned me there would be a lot of food. In fact, I was warned not to try and eat everything put in front of me in case it resulted in an Englishman-shaped explosion. An hour into the revelries, I slumped back in my chair having doggedly worked my way though chicken soup, numerous delicious chunks of fried pork, a plateful of dinner and several of the luscious cakes that were scattered liberally about the table. “Blimey,” I thought to myself “there really was a lot of food.” I was also feeling pretty smug because I had proved its equal.

When the second dinner arrived an hour later I assumed there had been some kind of mistake. I smiled condescendingly at the waitress and explained that she must have the wrong table since we had already eaten enough to see a bear through a moderately harsh winter. There were sniggers from my fellow guests. I began to fear that I had underestimated the challenge. Several hours later, as I pushed away my emptied fourth plate, I was a humbled and considerably rounder man. Then somebody wheeled in an entire roast pig.

Vodka is quite an important element of Polish weddings, in the same way that air is quite an important element of breathing. Plans for its purchase begin long before minor details, like who to marry, are addressed. Poland is sometimes described as a vodka culture and England as a beer culture. More accurately: Poland is a gulping culture and England is a sipping culture. The English like large drinks of relatively low alcohol content that they can sip continuously. Poles like small drinks of high alcohol content that they can swallow whole and in concert at irregular intervals. The French, who have a wine culture, like drinks somewhere between these two extremes that they can spend much of their time talking about. Vodka culture is a hard thing to adapt to. I’ve seen fellow countrymen compelled by habit to sip beer between rounds of vodka shots, and I’ve seen it end in very messy and dimly recalled disaster.

One of the perils of being a foreigner at a Polish wedding feast is that every living soul in the room will want to raise a glass with you. My Polish conversation skills were limited at that time, as opposed to now when they are merely feeble. In place of conversation we engaged in a series of one-word toasts: a long, long series. These usually began with toasts to Poland, then England, weddings, vodka itself, and then an increasingly eclectic string of objects according to my limited vocabulary. I’m fairly sure I proposed toasts to curtains and slippers at some point simply because I had learned the words for them the day before.

Dancing is also very important: it’s the women’s vodka. Polish wedding dancing is similar to commando training: it’s merciless and keeps going until you think you are going to die. The English regard dancing as something you do accidentally in darkened rooms after too much alcohol. English dancing is not dissimilar to epilepsy; it’s brought on by a chemical imbalance in the brain and often results in eye-poking injuries to bystanders. The first time my wife saw me dance she stuck a leather strap between my teeth and called an ambulance. Polish dancing is done in pairs in brightly lit rooms and involves almost no air guitar. If I hadn’t been so full of food that I couldn’t be physically levered off my chair beyond 11 o’clock I would certainly have ended the evening in hospital.

I also remember a lot of singing. I heard the Sto Lat song at least a hundred times. There were dozens of other rip-roaring songs too that I attempted to join in despite not knowing the words and frequently making an ass of myself by taking the women’s part. Nobody seemed to mind. My hosts were tremendously excited about me seeing the drunken party games at the end of the evening. Disappointingly they were exactly the same drunken party games I had seen at a dozen English weddings and about the only thing in the entire experience that wasn’t a hugely pleasant surprise.

Jamie Stokes