Wieliczka Salt Mine - more pictures, of course...

This is rock salt from the salt mine, which is the only open mining facility in the world working continuously since the Middle Ages. Not much mining goes on today (they just evaporate some of the super-saturated water that can be found in the mine and use it for local consumption) and the mine is supposed to end production in the next year or so and become solely a tourist attraction. It took us three hours to complete the tour of the sections of the mine open to tourists, and our guide said that we had covered only 1% of the total area of the mine! Most of the rock looks kind of like this: blackish greyish due to impurities with white veins of more pure salt. They hand out free samples like this in one of the chambers of the mine.


A picture of the underground restaurant where the tour ends. I think I read that it's the only completely underground restaurant in the world? And it's something like 135 meters under the surface. This place was dug out of the salt...so yeah, that ceiling is rock salt and under the wood floors is rock salt.







Huge banquet hall next to the restaurant, also dug out of salt.















A statue of Goethe made out of rock salt. There are tons of sculptures in the mine that were all chiseled from rock salt by the miners themselves, none by professional artists.















A chandelier made from pure crystal salt. This was in the main chapel (huge!) of the mine. There are 40 or so chapels in the mines because the miners were understandably very religious since they worked in such a dangerous place. Most of them are small chambers dug out of the salt, maybe the size of your average living room but with taller ceilings. I've got a picture of the largest chapel below.





A carving from the main chapel of the mine. I think this is honoring the resurrection of Jesus. All made out of salt, and sculpted by your average miner.























A salty version of "The Last Supper." It's amazing that the miner that did this could get the kind of depth he did.











A shot of the main chapel (all made out of salt) from the top of the stairs leading down into it. All of the chandeliers are made from the pure salt. This whole place was made by three miners. It's a lot newer than all of the other chapels in the mine, most of which date from the Middle Ages up through the 18th century. This one was made by miners in the first half of the 20th.






Passage through the salt.















A sculpture of one of the dwarves that miners thought lived in the mines. They were very superstitious and believed that there were dwarves that would help them mine the salt and keep them safe.











A shot down through the mine as we walked down the stairs from level 1 (about 60 meters below ground) to level 2 (about 90 meters). We traversed a total of 3 levels (the deepest at 135-ish) out of a total of 13 or so.









Head of Kazimierz the Great, a Polish king from the 1300s. He's kind of a big deal. Made out of salt, like everything else in the mine.











The whiter salt is called "cauliflowers." It gets made when water seeps down through the salt.













Another passage through the mine. That's Rachel and Bradley in the picture.













Nicholas Copernicus! Or Mikolaj Kopernik, as his name really was in his native Polish. He attended the university where we're taking our language classes (the Jagiellonian). He visited the mine as a tourist in the 1500s. The mine was already open for tourism (though only for the rich and famous) way back then.












So visiting the mine was pretty amazing. All the salt is the remains of the ocean that used to cover this part of Europe and evaporated who knows how many millions of years ago. Salt was apparently really important in the Middle Ages and the centuries that followed - our tour guide said that at the height of Poland's power (so the end of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance), 70 miners worked the mine and generated one third of the national income. Salt was more precious and valuable than gold. Pretty cool, huh? When we first got down in the mine, the guide said that if we didn't believe that all this black and gray-ish rock was really salt, we could lick the walls...super disgusting. You can actually see the places where the salt is worn and smooth-looking from people licking it. I did lick the little hunk of salt I got for free, just to check. It was super salty! I bought a candle-holder made out pink-ish salt and now I'm tempted to rub a little off every time I make pasta since I still haven't gotten around to buying some at the supermarket yet.

My room in Dom Studencki Piast, where I'll be living until June! It's supposed to be a double but I've got it to myself so I can use that bed under the window as a couch! The room us pretty tiny (by Swarthmore dorm standards). I'm standing against the door, which leads out into a foyer with doors to Rachel's room and the bathroom which the 2 of us share. To the right of the picture and right next to the window is a door leading to a balcony to the right of my room. Rachel's room also opens onto it. It's a nice balcony and big enough for some chairs in the summer, but a family of pigeons has a nest on the floor in one corner! We would get rid of it and clean the balcony except that the pigeons have two eggs...so we can't. But we get cute baby birds in a few months!


View of my room from the balcony door.













Electric "icicles" hanging in some of the trees downtown. They also have very pretty white-blue electric Christmas lights in beautiful shapes mimicking water in the fountains downtown, since they can't have the water running in the dead of winter.








The oldest building of Jagiellonian University, the school where we take our language class this semester.

The Bishop's Palace where Pope John Paul lived when he was a Bishop in Krakow. There's a picture of him in the window above the arch because this is where he stayed every time he visited the city after becoming Pope. After leading masses, he would come back to the Palace and talk to Krakowians from the window.

A statue of the Wawel dragon! It supposedly lived in the cave you can see down the hill to the left of the statue in the Middle Ages. There a couple stories about it. The most official one according to the tour guide who took us around Wawel Hill is that a noble (I forget exactly what he was) in 1000 or so managed to slay the dragon and because of this was made the first King.

The dragon is on the bank of the Wisła River below Wawel Hill, where the Wawel castle and cathedral are located. Wawel is where the rulers of Poland lived for hundreds of years when Krakow was the capital of the country until 1596, when the capital was moved to Warsaw. The Cathedral is a major symbol of Polish nationalism.

Statue of Pope John Paul II outside the Wawel Cathedral, where he was Bishop before becoming Pope. He also led his first mass ever in 1946 at one of the altars in this cathedral.

The door leading into the cathedral. There are some bones that you can see hanging to the left of the door that were uncovered in the area. The really long curved one is a mammoth bone, but legend has it that it's a bone of the Wawel dragon. There are two other bones that are part of the jawbone of a whale from millions of years ago and are also supposed to be the bones of the dragon. Legend also says that everything is ok as long as the bones are hanging next to the cathedral door. If they ever come down, though...Poland will be destroyed and the world will end. Whooey.

More pictures in the post below! I confused myself with all the windows that I had open and ended up making two posts by mistake...oh well!

Statue of Józef Piłsudski, a Polish hero from the first half of the twentieth century. He organized some Polish legions in 1914-1916 to fight alongside the Austrian army against the Russians. The Germans and Austrians pushed the Russian forces east and occupied the territory that had formerly been Poland, establishing a Polish kingdom. This was seen as a halfway step by Poles: they hadn't regained full independence, but at least they were back on the map (Poland didn't exist from 1795 when it had been partitioned by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, until 1918). When revolution happened in Russia, Piłsudski decided that Russia was finished and began to fight against Germany. He began a political figure in the new Polish government when the country gained independence in 1918.





A sunny(!) view of the Wisła River from the foot of Wawel Hill. The castle is behind me and stretches to the right.











Walking up the entrance road to the Wawel castle complex. The guy on the horse is Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish and American hero. He was an officer in the Continental Army during our revolution and a friend of Washington. He's a Polish national hero for resisting Russian control and led an important uprising in 1794.







Prison security guards at Wawel. There was some ceremony going on in the cathedral and thousands of prison guards from every city in Poland were in attendance. I wanted to know who was guarding the prisons.










Parading past the ticket office and into the Cathedral (to the right of the picture).











The side of the Cathedral showing a beautiful gold-covered Renaissance chapel. This chapel is pretty famous and is called "the pearl of the Renaissance."










A view of Krakow from Wawel hill. I stand on tiptoe to get my camera pointed over the top of the wall, which is a remnant of the old medieval fortifications.










Brad, one of the other Swatties in my program, with Ola, our guide. Ola is a student the same age as us who is studying psychology at Jagiellonian University. She's our primary go-to person while we're in Krakow.















Rachel, the third Swattie in the program, and Ola. Ola is the Polish nickname for her full name, Aleksandra.



















The Cathedral.













A view across the complex. The Cathedral and castle are to the right of the picture. The foundations in the middle are the remains of the medieval town that used to be here. It was destroyed by one of the armies that has occupied the area, and I think it was the Austrians?






A view of the palace courtyard which is completely enclosed by castle behind me and to the left of the picture. They call this a castle even though it doesn't really look one. This is the third castle to exist on the sight. First there was a Romanesque castle followed by a Gothic one built in the 1100s or 1200s, I think. That one burned down and this one was built in the early 1500s in the Renaissance style. It's one of the largest Renaissance buildings in Europe and is beautiful. Unfortunately, they don't let you take any pictures inside.


Another view across the complex. The castle is behind me.












A huge bell commissioned by a Polish king after a big Russian defeat in...I want to say the 1400s or 1500s? It weighs 13 tons and is made out of Russian cannons captured after the war and melted down. The bell tower housing this was incredible. They had to build a massive wooden tower inside the brick one using larch beams that are about 2 feet wide. The wood is necessary to absorb the vibrations of the bell, because the brick tower would collapse if it were rung without the wooden structure. Our tour guide said that you can hear this bell for several miles when it is rung on special holidays. It takes 12 men total, 6 on each of two ropes, to ring the bell. There's a myth that if you touch the clapper with your left hand and make a wish, it will come true! So of course we all did that on our way out. :)






A view of Rynek Głowny, the main market square, on a sunny Saturday. The large church is St. Mary's basilica.

Dungeons and Dragons Polish style

Today we turned left on Garbarska street after leaving school instead of turning right, our normal direction that takes us to the closest tram stop and home to Dom Piast. Just two doors down from the slightly sketchy-looking tunnel that leads through the store and apartment building on that side of the street was a gaming shop! There were some back rooms with a couple groups of people playing Dungeons & Dragons and Magic...and everything was in Polish! The cards, the board games. Amazing. Best of all, I found a Polish verion of this fantastic card game about bean farming that I played a lot this summer with my friends in DC and fell in love with. That was a must-have and is now sitting on my shelf waiting to be played with Brad and Rachel (the Swatties who are with me in Krakow this semester). I'm also very very tempted by a Polish version of Settlers of Catan and all the expansion sets...and the Magic cards!

We also did our first real cultural excursion today and visited an art gallery, Bunkier Sztuki (Art Bunker). The gallery was showcasing a special exhibition on collections. The whole first floor was a collection of old toys including dolls, doll houses and furniture, toy trains and cars, playing cards, postcards, board games, and tons of other toys from collections spanning the last two centuries or so. It was really cool but was very similar to the toy section of the Stadtmuseum in Munich and the Spielzeugmuseum in Nuremberg, both of which I visited last week (I have to remember to write a bit about Nuremberg at some point). The second floor was designed to be collections in as they are in there "natural" sitting, meaning collectible items are often stored by regular people. So the entire second floor basically looked like our basement at home. It was dimly lit and filled with dingy junk, of course all of it roped off. There was a book collection, lots of old machines and parts of machines, remnants of radios and computers, old cradles, bikes, and furniture, an extensive glass bottle collection, etc.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the postcard collection which was my favorite part of the museum! They had lots of cool things in it, including the first stamp ever used (a British black penny? I think that's what it was called...), the first stamped postcard sent in Poland, pictures of the men who supposedly invented the postcard (I would've thought that the postcard was a no-brainer and didn't merit the title of an "invention"), and postcards sent by famous Polish people. An interesting part was the display on postcards sent by lovers and the stamp language used for the purpose of conveying romantic sentiments and messages about clandestine meetings. They also used to write in tiny handwriting under the stamps, which would then have to be steamed off of the card by the recipient so that the message could be read! One said something along the lines of, "You must come over shortly after Christmas dinner, as if for a visit, and after you've stayed for awhile you must get up as if to leave. Then wait for me on the stairs where it is shadowy and I will shortly join you and show you into the salon where you can wait until the rest fo the family has gone to bed." All written under the stamps on the card. Hilarious!

Some sights from Munich

So I'm way behind considering that I've been to many cool places in the last week and I keep promising pictures! I blame it on having no internet (or very spotty connections) while staying in hostels in Munich and Nuremberg, on being too busy while I was in western Germany, in Berlin for the second time, and getting settled in Krakow. Here are a very few pictures from Munich where I was January 26-28. I already briefly wrote about the things I saw, so this mainly a picture post.



These first few are from the Residenzmuseum. This is the porcelain cabinet just off of the Hall of Ancestors. Beautiful room despite the opulence.
















This is from that room of reliquaries I mentioned in my last post. This is the case holding mummified infants. There are two in the bottom section and one in the top section. They don't look very gross since they're wearing pretty clothes and the exposed bits are obscured by something gauzy. I still think it's pretty gross, though.






Each of these cases holds a mummified hand...my pictures didn't turn out very well because I had to photograph through the glass of the museum display case.










Again with the glass of the display case, but I figured the gold dishes were worth a photo anyway. Talk about fine dining.











There were many many beautiful inlaid tables like this one on display, and I have lots of pictures of them! The designs are beautiful.










The Kaiser hall (Kaiser Saal in German) where people could have audiences with the ruler.














The museum had a very impressive collection of porcelain from China and Japan, which was apparently a big commodity for several hundred years. Mom, look at all the blue-and-white!










A really old tapestry. I had to post this one because of the Polish coat of arms in the middle of the tapestry. It was made in Persia in 1601-2 and commissioned by King Sigismund III Wasa of Poland. It was acquired in 1642 by the Wittelsbach family (the royalty of Bavaria who lived in the Residenz) when one of the Electors married a Polish princess.













I love this: a lacquered screen from China.












The Antiquarium! Huge and beautiful. I think this was originally built by one of the kings to house things from antiquity (hence the name) although later rulers also used it as a banquet hall. The main floor used to be higher but was lowered when the room was converted.









This is the Glyptothek, an art museum. I didn't go in it but I took a picture of the area because this huge square, Konigsplatz (it extends far to the right of where the picture ends), was converted by the Nazi party in 1938 to become the city's main parading ground and venue for celebrating the cult. I didn't know before going to Munich that it was where the Nazis started and where Hitler began his rise to power.





The Propylaen at the west-ish side of Konigsplatz. My Germany guidebook says its the "symbolic gateway to the new parts of the city." I thought it was cool because it's a pretty neo-classical structure. It's also one of the reasons why the Nazis turned Konigsplatz (behind it) into their main public venue. The neo-classical design of the Propylaen, the Glyptothek, and some of the other nearby buildings apparently appealed to the Nazis as an appropriate backdrop for the party parades, etc.

Neues Rathaus, the New Town Hall on Marienplatz. I wish I could have seen the carillon, which my grandparents recommended, but I missed the times!

Felderrnhalle. Aside from being a cool-looking yellow building, is where Hitler made a preemptive grab for power in 1923. He declared the overthrow of the Bavarian government and forced the State Commissioner, commander of the Bavarian Army, and the chief of the Bavarian police to join a provisional government. These three guys quickly realized that Hitler couldn't do much to enforce their cooperation, though, and revoked their participation in the provisional government. Hitler ignored this and staged a demonstration which resulted in the deaths of several demonstrators, policemen, and a bystander. His imprisonment as a result of this attempt at grabbing power is when he wrote Mein Kampf, which was so successful that his "minimum of 5 years" sentence became less than one year.

I have so many more pictures than this, obviously... Munich was definitely worth the visit. Most of the city looked exactly like Berlin but the history was so different and fascinating. I wish I could have had more time in the city and had done some research beforehand so that I knew a bit more about what I was seeing at the time and why it was important.