Big Adventures, Little World

We all met at the train station nice and early, but luckily for me and Elese we weren’t staying to far from the station so we didn’t have to get up quite as early. Our train ride was pretty much the same as when we came to Warsaw, except it was a different train layout with more room, less people, and more people we knew to talk to, but I still spent most of it trying to sleep. Once we had arrived back in Krakow, we stopped for some food, before going to find our apartment where we were staying. After that we just relaxed until a bit later in the afternoon when we decided to go visit The Wieliczka Salt Mine in the town of Wieliczka outside of Krakow. The salt mine was one of the world’s oldest operating mines until 2007 when it completely stopped all mining. We had a guided tour which took us down throughout the mines to a maximum depth of 130 metres underground. The ground we covered in the tour was only a small amount, about 3.5kms, of the total mines though, which go down to a depth of 327 metres and is over 300km long. Throughout the mines there are a number of statues and sculptures that were carved from rock salt by the miners, including saints, Pope John Paul II, dwarf miners, and sculptures of famous paintings including ‘The Last Supper’. In addition to this there is a large fully functional chapel that is carved from rock salt where people still come and pray today and have weddings held there. It is really quite incredible being in huge open areas over 100 metres underground. There’s also an underground lake, reception rooms that can be booked for functions, and a restaurant. Before leaving we stopped for a beer 130 metres underground, because really, when else would you get a chance to do that! It was time to leave, so we piled into the tiny elevators to take us back to the surface. With 9 people squished in to such a small place, it’s a good thing it only takes about 30 seconds to get back to the surface.

We got back to Krakow and found a small restaurant to eat at and thought it was time to order some traditional Polish food, especially now we had Lucas to help us order and tell what everything was. We started with some Polish soup and some potato pancakes. We had a couple of different kinds of soup including a tomato soup, as well a traditional Polish soup called Zur (or Zurek) which was delicious. It has Polish sausage and egg as well as some vegetables and sour rye and often served in a Polish bread roll hollowed out. We also had some pierogi which are Polish dumpling and have different kind of filling. We had some with meat filling and they were extremely tasty as well. Our whole meal was great, and we topped it off with some Polish beer, and then when we came to pay the bill, it worked out to be about £8 each, which was ridiculous considering how much we had eaten and how full we all were.