The Salt Herein

Sometimes, senility is a good thing. I totally forgot that the tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine begins with a walk down 368 steps. It's a round staircase, 7 steps to a landing. That gets you to level 1. When you finally walk the grand total of 800 steps, you are at level 3, 135 meters underground. In a two hour tour, you see approximately 1 per cent of the total mine. The walkways in the entire mine total about the distance from Krakow to Warsaw. The mine was the longest continuously operating mine in the world; it shut down production in 1996.

The interesting thing about the mine, besides learning about mining is seeing all the salt sculptures made by miners. There is a salt statue of Goethe, Copernicus, and Pope John Paul II, who all visited the mine and also sculptures of

 the 7 dwarfs, who probably didn't. There's a large cathedral on level 3 that is sometimes used for weddings and official events but since there's around 7000 visitors a day, it's rarely rented out.  The cathedral has sculptures of Biblical events, including a copy of Da Vinci's Last Supper. From the earliest times of the mine (1300s) miners made sculptures of salt in their spare time. Eventually, the truly talented miners were employed as sculptors full-time. Many of the ancient sculptures have disintegrated so most of what we see today were made after 1800.

Some King Dude

Goethe

Last Supper

Lola, Back to the Salt Mine

Hey, she volunteered to learn how to raise a pillar of salt from the level below.  They made her work only a few hours so don't feel sorry for her.

After walking down to the bottom of the mine, you take an elevator that gets you to the top in 40 seconds. Nine people get into each of the two chambers so it's a little slow-going, especially since it was having mechanical problems that had to be fixed. When we got back to the city, we had our typical 3:00 lunch. It seems we don't manage to get lunch until around then every day, making the midafternoon snack difficult to fit in. Luckily, there's a gourmet chocolate shop on every corner. The chocolate shops seem to be the only stores in this touristy town that don't offer English translations. Some clerks get perturbed with us when we ask "What's in this one? What's in that one?" They're all good so now we just point and buy.

We had chicken livers and chocolate cake for dinner with wine followed by more wine when we met up with the Trapdoor folks on the square where some American band was singing the blues (American, not Polish blues). Very entertaining.