Wieliczka Salt Mines and the First Week of Class

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but here's a new one!

I'll start with Sunday. That day we left the apartment around ten and look a 30 minute or so bus ride to the Wieliczka Salt mines! (Pronounced Vee-eh-lee-ch-kah) Unfortunately I was not feeling well on that day so my mind was a little preoccupied during the tour. We bought our tickets and lined up under a sign for visitors not speaking Polish. Our tour was given in English thankfully. Our tour guide spoke English wonderfully though with a noticeable polish accent. We descended 300 of the over 800 steps in the tour immediately. I was thankful that all of those steps were for going down and there was a lift at the end for going up. The first room we reached talked about the miners who worked there, every carving was made by the mines, no artists were brought in. With that in mind the carvings were incredible. 

The guide told us the legend of the beginning of the mine that goes something like this: (abridged of course) Salt signified wealth but Poland had no salt at he time. Hungary had salt and a Hungarian princess/queen was engaged to a Polish prince(?). She could have given the Polish jewels and gold but she wanted to give them something more so she brought them salt from Hungary. And to signify her engagement to Poland she threw her engagement ring into a cave. Later men mining the cave came out with a chunk of salt with the ring inside. 

This is not the complete legend but this is what I remembered. The tour brought us to different rooms and chambers, some of which can be rented for weddings or parties. A concert is put on inside the salt mines occasionally and the cathedral inside is still used for mass every Sunday. The air in the mine was clean and pure thanks to the salt. The original wooden supports are still in the mine and are still relied on, as well as addition supports, because the salt prevented the decay of the wood and petrified the wood to stone.

Sadly I felt so sick during the tour that I didn't pay much attention so I'll will definitely have to go back and tour it again. Here are a few pictures that Scott took. You had to buy a photo pass to take pictures and Scott bought one so I just had him take all of my pictures. Enjoy!

This is a model of the rig used to bring salt up. They had horses that spent their entire lives. The last horse left the mine just a few years ago and is living happily and is retired and probably eating hay all day. 

A wooden carving of the crucified Christ, the original paint is still on the wood, preserved by the salty air. 

The crystals on the chandelier are carved from salt!

The cathedral 

Carvings 

The last supper

Sam and Jen

Piotrek! Our director/"mum and dad" for the semester 

Looking up in another part of the mine

Scott licking the salt wall

I licked the wall

The girls 

A lake in the mine, you could take a boat down it up I don't think they do that any more. We heard a story of soldiers who drowned because they were drunk and flipped their boat, the water was so dense that they could not get out from under the boat. Otherwise it's impossible to down in the water. 

Another chapel

The tour ended at a gift shop where you could buy salt related gifts  and other things. I found bath salts that looked very night, I might go back for more. By the end of the tour I was feeling much better, though I do still plan on going back.  Many people go down into the mines and use the salt water for healing joint problems and the air for helping the lungs. 

As for the rest of this week, we started classes finally! 

I was supposed to have my first day of class on Monday but sadly we were told the class doesn't start until next Thursday. Tuesday I had my real first class, The Holocaust and it's Cultural Meaning, which will be a very interesting class for sure. It's lecture based and the professor really enjoys talking. She was polish but spoke decent English, and you can tell that she really knows her history of the Holocaust or Shoa. This is my first history class since high school so it will be very interesting to see how I do. The only grade is a final paper on a specific cultural effect of the holocaust. I might attempt to do something more along the lines of psychological effects. 

Yesterday my only class was Kraków-Jerusalem Polish Philosemitism. This class will be interesting. The professor walked in five minutes late and I surely thought he was another student. He started by asking everyone where they were from and what they studied, I stood out with my neuroscience major for sure. Though the professor would make incredible connections with where students were from or what they studied or even their last names. He knew Glick was German and associated with with the German word glück meaning luck. From this I could tell that he is a very quick witted and intelligent man, though very flamboyant and comical. He didn't have a syllabus for us and it seemed as though he didn't even know what path we will take during this course. He said that we will be leading the direction, which I found confusing because I don't even know what the course is about. This will be an adventure for sure. 

Today I was supposed to have a class on the Cold War but the class still doesn't start until next Thursday. My other class for today is a religion course titled Human Sacrifices and Cannibalism. I'm so excited for this course. This might be the most interesting and strange course that I will take. I will write about it during the next post. 

As for the other things going on in my polish life, Scott, Sam, Darcy, and I joined the gym across the street and have started working out daily since Monday. It gives us something else to do with our day, and I enjoy being back in a gym. We watched the polish film 80 Million about the Solidarity movement and communism in the 80's. Piotrek described it as somewhat similar to the Oceans movies, but this was based on real events that happened in Poland. 

I hope everyone is well back home, I think of people back home often. If you would like a letter or postcard from Poland please message me and let me know! 

Which love, 

Claire 

Vienna "The city of second chances"

What an exhausting past few days it has been. The last time I posted was about Budapest while i was in vienna. Today's post will cover my short stay in Vienna and our trip to the salt mine today!

We arrived in Vienna on Tuesday evening, completely exhausted. The train wasn't bad, we played cards almost the entire time. We saw a foggy Vienna countryside filled with windmills, unfortunately I couldn't get a good enough picture of the vast number of them. 

When we arrived in Vienna we had absolutely no idea where we were. Thankfully we caught ourselves shortly after we started going in the completely wrong direction. It only took us about 40 minutes to get to the hostel. The hostel we stayed in is part of an international chain called Wombat City Hostels and I highly recommend staying with them. We each payed a little over $20 a night for a quad room with four bunk beds and a bathroom. The hostel was quite large with a large main lounge, a bar, a public kitchen, and lots of tv's showing the Olympics! We were so excited to actually watch some of the Games because we haven't been able to find them anywhere else. We watched the devastating end to the women's hockey final where Canada score on the US in overtime. The hostel also offered a breakfast buffer that was incredibly delicious and only 4€!! Which was such a deal considering everything in Vienna was ridiculously expensive. 

After breakfast Wednesday morning we joined the complimentary tour put on by our hostel. My only regret is not videotaping the tour because there was so much interesting history to everything we saw and I only remember a few things. I thought the most interesting site on the tour was the art school that Hitler was rejected from. We only saw the corner of it but it was such an ordinary building that I never would have suspected that it has such important history. 

This is the state opera house! When the opera house opened, the people of Vienna hated it so much (because they wanted a grand staircase outside and it wasn't in the style they liked) that one of the two architects committed suicide before it was opened and the other they say died of a broken heart shortly after. Now the people in Vienna love the opera house and it's wide variety of shows performed each season. The opera house puts of different shows every single night so that the people can always see something different. 

Sadly we couldn't go inside and didn't have time to take an expensive tour but here is what we would have seen if we went inside. I am borrowing these pictures from google image and Pinterest 

There were also beautifully carved statues across the street from the opera and a wiener stand that sells the best wurst in Vienna (so they say). It's a popular place for people to go eat after the opera and discuss their opinions about the show. We tried the food. I will never eat something that delicious in America. Vienna has the best brats by far. I wish I could have found the mustard they put on the brat too because the mustard itself was the most delicious and perfectly spiced mustard I've ever had. And it was great at clearing my sinuses. 

This was the location of a building, I forget the name and type, where in World War Two a great deal of Viennese people to refuge in the basement during a bomb raid by the US. The building collapsed and trapped the people underneath. The building burned and though the firemen put out the fire, they still could not reach the people. There were no survivor and only just in the past few years have we developed the technology to excavate the area and unearth the bodies. The area is now a landmark with three statues, the tall white statues depict the soldiers and innocents who died, the second is very small metal statue of a Jewish man cleaning the streets (at the time the Jewish were tasked with scrubbing the streets of Vienna clean before they were sent off to camps), and the third is a statue depicting the people defending into a fiery Hell. There will never be another building erected in this location because the flat ground serves as it's own monument. 

I wasn't able to get a better picture but they call him the street cleaning Jew. The barbed wire has no symbolism, it's just there so that people don't sit on him. 

I'm afraid this is the most I remembered about the history of specific places on the tour. Please enjoy the pictures of other places that I can't name. 

This place has over 2,000,000 books/manuscripts. It was under renovation so we could not go inside. It was part of a palace(?) where someone who ruled Vienna lived. I apologize for my lack of history knowledge. 

This was my face during the entire tour. 

Hitler spoke from that balcony when he was in Vienna. The building is called the Heldenplatz. The second picture is from Wikipedia and you can see the two horses in front

This is a wonderful cafe where you can go and sit for hours reading. We had a cup of coffee there later in the afternoon. 

My hot chocolate with chocolate liquor 

The architecture in the shopping district is incredible

Stephensdom 

A pretty building

The design was burned into the actual stone bricks when it was built so the building would be easy to clean

First sighting of Rathaus (town hall)!

The grounds in front are turned into an outdoor ice rink during the winter

It's so cool!

Parliament

Two Vienna museums that faced each other and they looked the same

It's Schönbrunn Palace!

We're certain the gardens look beautiful in the spring but everything was still dead when we were there

The back side of the palace

The Gloriette on top of the hill behind the palace

This is from the statues at the base of the hill

The Gloriette in all it's glory 

The famous Ferris wheel that's really big!

The shop window of one of the few Swarovski stores in Vienna 

Vroom vroom

Rathaus by night!

Vienna was amazing and I wish we were able to spend more time there. We were disappointed with how incredibly expensive things were but our experiences were great all the same. I'm so thankful that my friend Brenna, an AMAZING William and Mary student who is studying in Vienna, was able to show us around a bit and hang out. She got coffee with us and helped us figure out what to see in our short time there. She also went out with us to an Erasmus (European exchange program) night at one of the clubs. The happy hour drinks were .5€ each and there were delicious. We had such a fun time singing and dancing in the club, and talking with locals too! Brenna was not only a blast but also made us feel so comfortable and safe in a crowded club in a country we had never been to. Hopefully she will visit us all in Kraków! 

Our length vacation ended with a night bus back to Poland, we left at 10pm and arrived in katawice at 6am with two hours to wait until our connecting bus to Kraków arrived at 8. The bus to Kraków only took a little over an hour but we were completely exhausted. We had a lazy Friday morning and afternoon, relaxing and napping, before we went out to dinner with the three new members of our study abroad program! 

Today we went to the Wieliczka salt mines but I will post about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is also our first day of classes! Which means I actually have to be a student this semester and I can't just go frolicking around Europe and Poland but I'm excited all the same. 

I love Poland so much but the one thing I'm craving that doesn't exist in Poland is macaroni and cheese, specifically Kraft Mac and cheese. Just a little side note in case anyone was wondering what I miss from America, aside from people. 

And to explain the title, our guide told us that Vienna was the city of second chances because the Viennese usually hate things at first (the opera for example), and then later decide that they love it. They also often give unusual names to things at first and the names just seem to stick. A theater, I forget it's real name, has an ornate golden ball on top yet the Viennese call it the Golden Cabbage. 

Best wishes to everyone back home, I miss you all lots and send my love!

Claire