No problems with the pickup at the airport and the trip to
the Sheraton Grand Hotel. We have a total of 112 people on the trip, not quite
a full shipload, but close. This is apparently the first year for this tour,
and this is the third time it is being run. We have 3 tour directors for the
land portion, which is about right for a Tauck tour, and the first days’ tours
have gone quite well.
The welcome reception was held in the Wieliczka Salt Mine.
Much of the European land mass was under a salt sea millions of years ago,
which is why there is so much salt to be found. Salzburg and the Salzkammergut (where
we will be visiting from the cruise) are other examples of salt-related
economies from early Europe. The Salt Mine in Krakow was used from the 1250s
until about 2007 for salt production; over that time it became a huge system of
tunnels and shafts, with over 240 km of tunnel and a maximum depth of 327
metres underground. Now some of the larger spaces have been turned into
reception rooms, a large chapel, and an underground saltwater (surprise!) spa.
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| Entrance to the Salt Mine |
We only went into the first reception room at 135 metres
below ground level, and we did that using a miners’ elevator. We would have
taken a photo, but there wasn’t enough room to hold the phone up between the 8
of us in there. Fortunately, the walls were not solid but perforated metal and
the ride was only about 30 seconds, so Monica didn’t have too much of an issue.
Once down there we walked about 100 metres along a tunnel
and then got to the reception room.
There were 110 Tauck guests at the dinner, along with our 3
tour directors, so the room was quite full, but it certainly was amazing to see
how they carved the ceiling and the walls out, and even made the chandeliers.
In some areas, what looked like wooden beams were actually also carved from the
salt walls.
Dinner was interesting and quite delicious. Salad, soup, and
then a plate with roast goose, potato patties and a piece of spinach tart was the
main course…but that wasn’t all of it. This was accompanied by platters of
pierogies, and for dessert a type of cheesecake. Sorry, didn’t have a chance to
take photos of the food. Suffice it to say that we were all quite full when it
came time to stuff ourselves back into the elevators for the trip back up. I’m not
sure if we got the same number in as earlier in the evening, or if we were one
less to accommodate dinner!
Thursday was a heavy touring day – we joined a walking tour
in the morning that covered much of the old town of Krakow, including Wawel
Castle. The castle and cathedral inside are seen as the most important
historical buildings in the whole country.
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| Wawel Castle from our hotel room at the Sheraton Grand |
Before even going up into the castle courtyard itself, we
stopped to see the dragon sculpture outside. There is a long-standing myth and
a bedtime story told to children about Smok Wawelski, a dragon that lived in a
cave and terrorized the people of the village nearby. He gorged himself on
young maidens and sheep, and eventually, when the town ran out of both, the
king promised the hand of his daughter to anyone who could vanquish the beast.
A lowly tailor by the name of Krak finally lured the dragon with a sheep
stuffed with sulphur, which burned the dragon up. Krak married the princess and
the king gave them the town, named Krakow after the man, ‘and they lived
happily ever after’. Of course, Larry prefers the other version of the story
our guide told us. The dragon only ate virgins and died of starvation!!! The
sculpture of Smok will actually blow fire from his mouth at certain times, but
we didn’t see it. According to the tourists' guide to Krakow, it used to be
that you could send a text message to a certain number and Smok would breathe
fire. Maybe he got too many messages and kept running out of fiery breath...
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| Smok |
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| Views from the Castle across the Vistula River |
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| Outer buildings surrounding the cathedral courtyard |
A fortification on the hill was the political centre of the
Polish kings since 1000 AD, and the Cathedral inside has been the coronation
spot from 1319 until the capital was moved to Warsaw in 1596. Some people
believed that moving the capital away from Krakow was the start of the run of
bad luck for the country that has plagued it ever since! The Cathedral is
beautiful both outside and inside, but there is no photography allowed inside.
It is like the Polish Westminster Abbey – most of the important kings and
queens are interred inside; and to many modern people another very well-known
and influential person is also buried here – Pope John Paul II, who was born in
Krakow and served as its bishop and cardinal before being elected Pope.
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| Roof drains on the cathedral have dragon-head ornaments on them. We saw this on many older buildings in town. |
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| The monument to Pope John Paul II |
Wawel Castle was also the headquarters of the German Nazi
occupiers of Poland during World War II. Krakow was not destroyed, as much of
the rest of the country was, because German historians found documents that
showed a large population of Germans in the 15th and 16th
Centuries, when Krakow was already a centre of intellectuals and learning in
Europe. So they claimed it had once been a German city, so it could just be
reverted back to German rule. And it is very fortunate that it happened that
way. It is a beautiful spot, and quite the tourist destination.
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| The courtyard is still under restoration. This was turned into living quarters for the commander of occupied Poland and his family, as well as some offices. |
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| These small plaques name only about 10% of the all the people who donated money to restore the castle after the Russians, who occupied Krakow after the war, finally left. The government didn't have enough money for the work, so people from many countries financed it instead. |
After seeing the castle, we started our walk through the Old
Town, which has buildings dating back to medieval times. Churches, monasteries
and universities abound in this city – it could take a few days to see
everything here, not including the museums.
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| Church of Saints Peter and Paul |
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| The Church of Our Lady |
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| A very interesting wall sculpture on a street in the old town |
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| A private garden near one of the many universities in the city. |
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| Memorial to Nicolaus Copernicus, who studied in the city in the late 1400s. |
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| The courtyard of the university where Copernicus studied. Awesome to stand here and realize that one of the great mathematicians and astronomers walked in exactly the same place! |
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| Market Square and the Cloth Building. The open area was a large market, and the more precious and expensive goods were sold in the cloth building to keep them more secure. |
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| St. Mary's Basilica |
There is one particular event that happens hourly at the clocktower of St. Mary's Basilica - a trumpeter blows a traditional Polish anthem with a very abrupt stop in the middle of a note. The story goes that hundreds of years ago, the watchman in the tower would play as a signal of impending invasion and the town would prepare to defend itself. He was at this particular point in the melody during one of his warning calls when he was struck in the throat by an arrow and killed; but he had still given the townspeople enough time, so they defended successfully against the attack. He is now commemorated by this event, with firefighters being the trumpeters.
For lunch on our own in the market square, after looking
around and discovering most restaurants had a larger lunch menu than we wanted,
we sat at a restaurant behind the ‘Cloth Building’ and had pierogies for lunch.
They were quite delicious, and all we really wanted because in the afternoon we
took the tour to Auschwitz and Birkenau.
Auschwitz was a work camp that became a mass extermination
camp in 1941 and was used for this purpose until late 1944. The guided tour
through the exhibits and buildings is very well presented, and shows the
breadth of what was being done just by the sheer numbers of personal effects in
the displays. When people were moved from their homes to these camps, they were
told they were going to a better life where they would have homes and work, so
they took with them things they believed they would need. Only when they got off
the train at Auschwitz and later, Birkenau, did they realize this was not true,
and by then it was too late. Thousands upon thousands of shoes, combs, brushes
– and this was only a very small number out of what survived a final attempt to
burn the buildings down when it became clear that the Nazis would lose the war
in early 1945.
Fortunately we didn’t have to go through the more gruesome
exhibits if we didn’t want to, so Monica didn’t, but she could still hear the
commentary from our guide through the VOX Box – and that was quite enough.
We could have taken photos of some of the exhibits, but it
didn’t feel right to do so, so we only have these from the outsides of the
buildings.
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| The infamous slogan over the entrance gate to Auschwitz |
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| A view of the workers' barracks |
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| The train tracks leading through the entrance gate to Birkenau. |
It was a long day, and by the end of it we just wanted to
relax a bit. We had a meal at the hotel’s sports bar, called Someplace Else. It
was just what we needed; that and a cup of tea in our room, and we went to bed,
ready for the 6:30 alarm for our day trip to the southern Polish resort town of
Zakopane.
The weather forecast was for possible rain showers around
noon, with a chance of thunderstorms. For the first time since Salzburg we packed
the raincoats and the umbrella for a day trip. The bus ride was scheduled for 2
½ hours each way – this because tour buses are electronically restricted (when
they pass under wireless sensors on the road they tell the driver if he has
been going too fast) to a maximum speed of 100 km/hr on the Autobahn, and
everyone came prepared with something to do on the trip. Monica was going to
catch up on writing blog posts, and Larry would continue his reading – when he
wasn’t napping!
The skies began clearing as we climbed into the lower Tatra
Mountains, and when we made our couple of stops before reaching Zakopane, it
was looking quite nice.
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| Smoked sheep milk cheese called Oscypki - quite delicious |
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| Wood carving of a cheesemaker |
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| The cheese smoking hut - obviously much used |
Our next visit was to the wooden chapel of Jazczurowka, the Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This is a Roman Catholic chapel built between 1904 and 1907, in a style particular to the region. It is still used; it does not have a regular parish but there are scheduled masses.
It was still nice as we did our bus ride through the town,
but we realized that it was a much bigger town than we expected, and that there
were not very many roads of a size to take a highway bus! Once we got off our
bus, we had a very brief walking tour to just take us to the main pedestrian
street and show us places to have lunch, and then we had some time on our own
for a meal, or whatever.
As we were still sitting outside under an umbrella at our
chosen restaurant, it started to rain. We already had our beverages, but our
lunch entrees had not been served yet. Looking toward the door into the
restaurant, we saw our server motioning to us. She had our orders in her hands,
but wasn’t going to come outside to serve them! It was OK for the guests to run
through pouring rain, but they weren’t going to. The food we had turned out to
be really tasty, but the service left quite a lot to be desired – so much so
that we advised the tour guide that it might be better not to recommend that
establishment until they do something about that.
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| Zakopane is a wintertime resort town for the most part, being in the Tatra Mountains. Its claim to fame is world cup winning ski jumpers and the longest natural run in the world - rather than being built on the hill, it is built into the hill! |
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| Once we got in from the rain, Larry had his goulasch soup in a pot. |
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| Monica's Polish sausages - not as big as they look here! |
After lunch we had some time before we were all to meet
back, so Monica took a few photos at the local Catholic Church in the middle of
town.
Since we’ve been sitting on the bus for almost 2 hours
already and aren’t that far out of Zakopane – a thunderstorm with heavy rain, a
two-lane road, and major road construction are to blame for that – this post is
pretty much done.
Everyone is being given a lunch or dinner, their choice, at
the hotel’s restaurants while we are in Krakow. We decided to make our
reservation for tonight, get our things repacked - by now we just open the
suitcases and our clothes roll themselves up and jump right in! - and get some
rest, ready for the 6:00 a.m. bag pull. Good night!
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