October 8, 2023

Dateline – Krakow Poland

Ten hours of sleep did much to restore me to my usual state of mind and health and I awoke this morning to a beautiful day. Yesterday’s cloud cover and burned off and the sun was shining but it was still sweater weather with temperatures in the high 50s and low 60s, perfect for city walking. As the organized portion of the tour was not to start until mid-afternoon, I ventured out on my own to explore the Old Town of Krakow on foot. I love European city walking. The old city centers were designed centuries before the internal combustion engine and are very much designed around foot traffic and pace. I had no particular plan in mind, just go wherever the crooked streets looked interesting. My hotel, next to Wawel Castle on the river is more or less one end of the old town, presumably the river port. The old city walls surrounded the medieval fortified town that stretches about half a mile north with most of the interesting sited enclosed within that ring. City walls were made obsolete by gunpowder and most of it was torn down long ago and was replaced by a ring of parkland noted for it’s many old chestnut trees. This being fall, one must dodge the nuts as they come down.

I skirted the castle (a visit is scheduled for tomorrow) and headed up into the center of the old town to the market square dominated by the cathedral, some covered markets, and what I take is the national academy of music. (Live choral and orchestral music throughout the day – they seemed to be doing symphonic arrangements of The Beatles as I was nosing around. Eleanor Rigby is recognizable even with Polish accents.). Some shopping, some marveling at medieval design and architecture (although I think a lot of it is reproduction, replacing WW II damage), some walking. A stop at a chocolate shop for hot chocolate with cayenne and cinnamon. Chocolate bars seem to be as plentiful as coffee shops.

I have not yet figured out the intricacies of the Polish language. Words all seem to have a surfeit of Js, Ws, and Zs, not enough vowels, and the pronunciation seems to have little in common with the spelling. I’m sure there are rules but I’m not likely to learn them in four days. Fortunately, English being the most international European language currently, most things are signed in English as well. I try to see if my in my head translation from the Polish has anything to do with the actual English when I do peek. Perhaps if I start watching Polish TV. I started to figure out a little Hungarian that way,

This afternoon was a new experience, a tour followed by a four course formal dinner 400 feet underground in a decommissioned salt mine. They were actually mining salt here form Neolithic times until they ceased mining operations in the 1990s when they figured out they could make a great deal more money by opening to tourists and have them travel through hundreds of years of mining history and technology carved into the salt deposit. (A prehistoric inland sea that dried up leaving a salt pan that was converted to rock salt over millennia of geologic processes). Many galleries, chambers and steps carved from rock salt, most of what we saw dating from the 17th century but we covered very little of the total despite two hours and several miles of walking. The dinner, in a formal dining room carved out of rock salt with chandeliers decorated with salt crystals was very good.

I lie when I say that the mine no longer produces salt. It no longer produces mined salt but they have to keep pumping water out of it, as all mines much, and as the entire rock structure is salt, the pumped out water is brine. They let that evaporate and harvest that salt for sale and export. Best of both worlds. I have a small bag of it, a lagniappe from the dinner, which I will add to my spice cupboard when I get home. Tommy would approve.