After a long travel day of five hours we were exhausted when we finally settled down into our cute little apartment.
The next morning we woke up to find Ellie the elf had decided to do paper chains today! It was really cool because the night before we had wished for paper to make paper chains out of… after making all the paper chains we attended a lunch Christmas party with extended family of Renata’s.
Next day, we headed to the Cathedral and the Krakow castle. There we saw the armory and the state rooms, and in the cathedral, we saw the bell tower, and all the tombs of dead kings and queens.
Once we had finished exploring the castle, we decided it was time to get something to eat. We chose a pierogi place not far from the castle or the market we were going to once we had finished with our lunch. Pierogi’s were not as good as Tati’s home made ones, but the potato pancakes with goulash were excellent. We wondered around the Christmas market, found a few geocaches then came home and had a good nights’ sleep.
Wieliczka, the local salt mine was awesome. We went on the tourists route, because Maxine isn’t yet old enough to do the miner’s route. The only way down was by 54 flights of stairs, (54*7=378) to get to the first level at around 63m underground. We were really hoping it wasn’t the way up too! The entire place is made of salt, and the guide kept telling us to try licking some of the salt (just maybe not the floor everyone stands on!).
The miners carved very intricate beautiful statues out of salt rock, and there are lots of underground chambers. We only saw one percent of the mine on our tour, and it was three hours long! The mine has nine levels, and over 300km’s of underground passages. The miners even carved churches underground to pray to God for safety against the mine caving in. It’s still working church and you can even have a wedding in there, but the waiting list is two years long!
Apparently the salty air is good for you, and they even used to send lung patients to spend a week or two in there. We also saw saturated brine and salty under ground pools. Because the water is salty, it is a preservative - someone accidentally lost a pretzel and you can still see the shape of it, just covered in salt! We learnt how they used to transport the salt around and how they got it up to the surface. To sum it up it was fabulous and interesting day in the mine, and finished off nicely with a mulled wine/hot chocolate when we reached the surface again.
We spent Christmas Eve with Dziadek, Renata and her mother and aunt. We had a simple traditional polish Christmas Eve dinner, with a few presents. This was followed by a very calm Christmas Day, well, relatively calm and quiet after all the presents were unwrapped. We made a roast chicken, with potatoes and veg and Skyped with friends and family. Unfortunately we had to start packing up as boxing day we were off to Warsaw to catch our flight to Helsinki.
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