To the Salt Mine!

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

It’s time to bid adieu to our international collection of new friends!  Everyone gathers on the sofa and chairs and has a continental breakfast. Pieter went into town last night by bike and got lost, then stayed out so late that it was four a.m. when he came in!  It turns out that Johnny as out that late, too;  but he wasn’t talking!  Misha was finally a bit more forthcoming about himself.  He is an engineer working in environmental protection for a Russian gas company.  "You know the Russian government is just a bunch of dirty billionaires!" It’s hard to tell where the private sector leaves off and the government begins.

Fun and functional living room/ breakfast  gathering place

Krupka on alert!

View down the hill

Everyone says their good-byes and heads off, as must we.  We finally have good directions to get us back to our main road home.  It would have been so simple to get here if the BIOB hadn’t been “helping” us!

Interesting architecture!

Whew! He just cleared that!

For about two hours it is smooth sailing.  It is even easy to find the famous Salt Mine at Wieliczka, if you just follow the signs and ignore the fact that the road listed on the map never shows up on any of the highway signs!  The Wieliczka Salt Mine and its sister mine, the Bochnia Salt Mine, together have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Bochnia is the oldest mine in Poland. Wieliczka is often called "The Underground Salt Cathedral of Poland."

We take our ticket for the parking and head for the mine.  We walk through a park with sculptures lining the walk.

The artist's name is Tadeusz Nowak.  The piece is "ON"

Once there you buy your admission ticket (special prices only for students, not seniors) and line up for the tour in your language.  Our next tour is at 2:30 and it’s already 2:15!

As we file in everyone takes a receiver and an ear phone .  Well, we’re supposed to.  I go back to get ours.  We set the frequency to frequency193 and our guide can speak in everyone’s ear without having to yell or distracting other groups.  We’ve seen the system several times and commented on how cool it is! The tour takes three hours and there are lots of facts and figures about how deep the mine is and how it has been in use for seven centuries.  The miners have always been paid employees, never slaves, and there were never women or children employed in the mine.

There are other tidbits that have stuck in my brain, such as the fact that all the walls, floors and ceiling are made of salt;  there is a cart called a Hungarian dog because the Hungarians were the first ones to use carts to move things in the mine and the wheels made a noise like a dog.  Horses were used in the mine; they were brought down when young and stayed down there for twenty years!  There were underground stables and everything.  There was a belief that the horses went blind from working in the darkness;  it isn’t true.

Nicholaus Copernicus, among many notables
that visited the salt mine.

The princess of the legend receiving her ring.

Kazimierza Wielkiego

The first level down is filled with displays showing how the various mining machines worked as well as some salt sculptures.  The next level houses more sculptures.  All of them were made by the miners!  They would work their shift, go up to the surface, then return underground to carve!  Many are religious in nature, although one of the favorites tells the story of the noblewoman who was betrothed to the Prince of Krakow She asked her father for a piece of salt as her dowry.  Her father threw her ring down the mine shaft to mark it as hers, except that the mine wasn’t in her country!  Later, when she had the prince dig the first mine in Krakow, the first salt crystal delivered to her contained her ring!  It had followed her underground!

Typical corridor.  White salt crystals, which are 95% NaCl
are called cauliflower by the miners.

These are in the Holy Cross Chapel

There are several lakes underground and three chapels.  The most amazing one is so huge that mass is held there every Sunday and last year forty couples had their weddings there!  Even the chandeliers are made of salt!  It is called St. Kinga's Chapel.

These are the names of the miners who created all the sculptures in the chapel. The third one is the man who created the statue of Pope John Paul II, which has to be added recently

After the chapel we visited two of the underground lakes which, of course, are filled with brine.

There is a five minute rest stop for people to go to the restroom.  Naturally there is a small gift shop there, too!

While here, we were treated to music by Chopin.

When our tour is over we are invited to check out the children’s play area, the underground theater which has a ten minute video, and the restaurant.  As you would expect, the official tour ends in the gift shop!

Since we’ve eaten at the highest restaurant in Poland, we figure we should eat at the deepest one as well!  Zurek, a pork meatball, sauerkraut stew, carrot salad and cabbage salad make up our menu and we split everything, except the soup.  We each want our own bowl of that!

We queue up for the elevator to the top, since climbing back up from more than 300 meters isn’t on my bucket list!  The guide comes to lead us to the lift but no one says how long the walk will be!  I’m sure we walked for a  minimum of twenty minutes!  Now comes the big moment.  About sixteen or seventeen of us fill the car quite adequately and the rise begins.  In seventeen seconds (yes, I was counting!) the doors open!  I’m so relieved that it was an easy trip for my claustrophobic travel buddy!  We nearly didn't come because the photos on line look like you ride up in a miner's lift with the open front and many people in a tiny, tiny little space!  So glad this was a "modern" elevator!

This is the park we crossed to get back to our chariot.

Now the trick is to find our car!  We have exited in an area that we’ve never seen before!  No wonder there was so much walking.  We head off in a direction that might be the right one and stop to ask for directions.  We follow those and once again stop to ask for help.  Yes!  Look!  We recognize this place!  And there’s our car waiting patiently!  Now all we have to do is get home.  Since the road on the map wasn’t on the signs, we can’t just follow it back.  The parking attendant give us directions and they get us most of the way back to the “interstate”.  Then there’s a spell of random driving, then the asking of directions from a young couple on bicycles.  They probably were right except that the road they sent us on wound up being under construction. 

Happily it was a short train!

More driving and desperately searching on our inadequate map for unpronounceable names, and we stumble onto the E44/A4  We get on and it doesn’t matter which direction we’re going, we can correct for that later!

One exit and re-entry in the other direction and we know where we are!  In just a jiggle we’re home!  Our plan is to do laundry tonight so it will have lots of time.  In Poland they don’t use dryers.  Up stairs we go with all our dirty clothes to do battle with the Polish washer.  How hard can this be?  Welllll we guess at the settings and are pretty sure we’re okay, although it says it front-loading little heart wants an hour and a half to do the first of our three load! 

Fine, we wait and go back upstairs close to time.  No, those aren’t actual minutes.  It still wants another twenty, so when those have passed I go up to retrieve the first load.  It says 0:01.  Good timing!  Five minutes later Marilyn comes up to check on me.  It still says 0:01 and it won’t open and it won’t spin and it won’t drain.  After looking on line, we finally unplug it and eventually it unlocks.  The clothes are still soaking wet.

After a lot of debate and button pushing Marilyn calls Monika.  She has no ideas.  We write Paulina and in the mean time we get the door open, remove the clothes, take them downstairs, wring them out and hang them on the drying rack.  I take a couple of my things out of the “to be done” stack and wash them by hand and hang them up in the bathroom with everything else.  Maybe Paulina will have some words of wisdom from across the pond.  This is her first international exchange and although Marilyn gave her lots of suggestions, like leave instructions for the washer, there hasn’t been any of that.  And some of what Monika told us turned out not to be accurate, so it’s been yet another adventure.

Sunset behind the power station we can see from our window.

But we saw everything we wanted to see in the Tatras and we saw the salt mine and we’re home safely, so all is well.