Rainy Day; Went Underground

Thursday, Aug. 21, 2014--Krakow

This was the first rainy day since I left San Antonio a month ago.  I know I've been incredibly lucky not to have rain for a month in Europe, but it was still a disappointment to see it falling this morning.  And it wasn't just a drizzle.  It was slightly blowing RAIN requiring an umbrella and cautious steps.

My solution was to do something totally different today.  I went underground to tour the salt mine in nearby Wieliczka. 

Getting there wasn't easy, though.  I walked about 12 blocks to get to where my guidebooks said that the mini-buses for there would be leaving.  There were no mini-buses.  Two women there marked the new location for the mini-buses on my map--3 blocks from my apartment!!!  So I had to walk all the way back again in the rain.

That was just the first hassle, though.  When the mini-bus dropped me off, I was still a 10-minute walk in the rain from mines.  And when I got to the mines, the lines of people to buy tickets were about 100 yards (100 m) long with no cover from the rain!  After a moment, a woman walked up to her family behind me and said that we were in the wrong line.  It was for Poles.  There is another international line.  I went with them only to find out that the international line was as long as the one for Poles!

I overheard the woman talking to her youngest son.  I asked, "Are you Danish?"  She was surprised that I recognized the language and wanted to know how I knew it.  We visited for quite a while, because it took us 45 minutes in line before we got to the ticket window.  She is Danish (from Viborg) and is married to a man from Croatia.  They live in Croatia, but she takes the children back to Denmark every summer.  I asked if they celebrated a Danish-style Christmas or a Croatian-style one.  She said that it is a blend, then she added that his whole family loves the Danish rice-almond pudding and that it wouldn't be Christmas for any of them now without it.  We all ended up in the same tour group, since they and their sons all speak and understand English.

Visiting the mines ended up being a major undertaking.  Not only did it take long to find the bus to go there and to stand in line for the tickets, but the tour is THREE HOURS long!!  Much of it involves walking down tunnels (after walking down about 50 flights of stairs) from one chamber to another.  The attraction is that the miners have created carved figures in many of the chambers.  What I (and probably everyone else) didn't understand in advance is that there is only one major chamber--the one you always see in photographs.  Most of the other carvings are just single sculptures of a king here, a founder of modern Poland, there.  The only other chamber that I thought was cute and interesting was one that had a series of gnomes carved in playful poses.  The two sons of the Danish woman became tired and bored about halfway through the tour.  I kept worrying that I might not make it back to Krakow for my 18:15 appointment.  Anyway, I left the apartment at 9:45, I caught the mini-bus about 10:45, I was in line to buy my ticket from about 11:30-12:15, the tour lasted from 12:30 until 3:30, and I got back in town by mini-bus at 4:15.  That's a lot of time for one attraction.  And it was over-priced at $26 per person.  Yet the salt mine gets 8000 visitors per day at this time of the year and a total of 1.2 million visitors each year.

After a short rest at the apartment, I went to the nearby shopping center.  I had plans to meet Andro, the young Georgian man I met when I stayed in the apartment with him and his parents in 2008.  He lives here in Krakow now and is engaged to marry a Polish woman.  He works for Kenexa which is owned by IBM working with their clients in Ukraine and Russia.  Even though he is now about 30 years old, he still looks like a student.  He took me to a small student restaurant in town for inexpensive Polish food.  We each had a soup--a noodle soup for him and a bowl of beet soup with a fried chicken croquette for me.  Then we drank a beer as we continued talking.  We were only together for 1 1/2 hours, but it seems as if we talked enough for 3 hours!  His English is perfect, and we just rushed from one topic to another--his parents, their health, changes in Tbilisi, his job here, his fiance's job (she's an author), my trip, the problems in Ukraine, the problems between Armenia and Azerbaijan, etc.  His parents have done a great job of raising and educating him.  He's a very sweet man.

This morning, I bought my bus ticket to get me to the mountains on Saturday.  It will take me to Zakopane on the Polish side of the border and should arrive 30 minutes before the bus leaves for the Slovakian side of the border.  Now I need to read my Slovakian guide to determine exactly where I want to stay overnight for the 2-3 nights I will be there.  If any of you are looking back to my itinerary, you will see that I cut a day off the planned visit here in Krakow.  After leaving the mountains, I hope to make an extra stop for just half a day/one night in Bardejov which is supposed to be a very nice town in Slovakia.  I had wanted to go there, but cut it because of time constraints.  Now I think it probably can be seen in half a day and have planned an extra day to try to go there.