Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Poland: The Home Stretch (With Pics)

So I had two options for getting back to Ukraine:

1) The overnight train from Krakow to Kyiv. Easy, simple, they come to your coupe and stamp your passport at the border and you don't even have to get out of bed. Fall asleep in one country, wake up in the other. Cost: $60.

2) Take a train from Krakow to a border town. Take a marshrutka from the border town to the border. Wait in line at the border, go through customs then walk across. Catch a marshrutka from the border to Lviv. Catch an overnight train from Lviv to Kyiv. Cost: $20.

Which did I go for? Dude, I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer.

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The train from Krakow to the border town. Polish trains don't sell seats, they sell tickets. When all the seats are sold out, people stand in the hallway, like I did.

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At the Ukrainian border. What's cool was that at the Polish border town (I forget its name), everything was in both Latin and Cyrillic letters. Because so many Latin letters in Polish have different sounds ("S" is "Sh" and "W" is "V" for example), it is easier for me to read Polish words in cyrillic than it is in Latin. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the signs.

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At customs. This is the slavic definition of an orderly line.

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The line to get into Poland. Like at the Mexico/USA border, the line into the poorer country is far faster. Seth and Sean came this route and stood for four hours in the rain waiting to cross into Poland. The crush near the door because so bad that Seth spent half an hour with one hand over his head and his ribs shoved into a metal pole. Luckily, I was across in twenty minutes.

The marshrutka to Lviv was another story. As if welcoming me back to Ukraine and its quaint customs, the marshrutka to Lviv was packed solid when we left and only became more so because the driver never stopped picking up customers on the whole two hour drive. I spent most of it standing in the aisle with all my weight on my left foot because an overly large woman was shoving into my on my right side and someone's box of fruit was between my feet. Soon my leg started to hurt from the weight, then burn, then finally, thankfully, went numb.

Still, I felt my luck was holding: I managed to catch the last train to the border town with seconds to spare (it started moving as soon as I set foot on board) and caught the last marshrutka to Lviv. From there, whether my luck held is debateable: after spending thirty minutes in a mob at the Lviv train ticket window, I was told that on all five of the trains leaving to Kyiv that night, the only seat available was in SV, which is the second highest class on the train. A platzcart ticket--the lowest class and which I usually take--would have been about $7. The only way I could get to Kyiv by the next day, and I had to, because Steve and Carrie's birthday party was the next day, was to buy a $40 train ticket.

So I did.

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My SV coupe

For those keeping up, my extremely complex journey across half of Poland and half of Ukraine ended up costing the same as if I had just gotten on the overnight in Krakow. Well, almost. I did the math and found that I saved myself $6. Six dollars ia a lot of Pepsi in Ukraine, so I will say it was worth it.

SV, though, was not worth it.

But, finally, I was home.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Poland: Beatles Party (With Pics)

Last night in Krakow, and what better place to spend it than at a Beatles themed party at a local bar named Ouba-Douba? Seth, Sean and I arrived too late to see the Beatles cover band, but a DJ was on hand to spin the best of the 50s and 60s (yes, the 50s and 60s) for us. It was a new experience for me because I had never tried to figure out how to dance to "Break on Through to the Other Side" on a floor packed with tourists and Poles before.

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Beatles night painting at the bar

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Me with one of the cover band members. No matter how much we begged, they wouldn't play another set.

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Me with Anya

Let me explain about Anya, this cute little Polish heartbreaker. She came out of nowhere and started dancing with me, extremely inebreated on alcohol and no doubt a few other substances. Polish is close to Ukranian (actually, it can be argued that most non-Russian vocabulary in Ukrainian is probably from Polish, but don't say that in front of Ukrainian nationalists) and so we were able to talk a bit, but not much as she was more interested in dancing.

And dance she did, with all of us. She generally cycled between seemingly-passed out, dancing against me with so much dead-weight that it was hard to keep my balance, to perking back up and bouncing around. She had a lot of infectious happiness, though. I say heartbreaker because even thoughwe danced together for more than an hour, I got the feeling she was dancing with me because I could dance, not out of any attraction. I wanted to kiss her but didn't get the vibe and so never tried. Call me punk if you will; I was just having fun dancing.

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Seth dancing with Anya and Sean mugging for the camera

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Alexandra, a Polish girl who is a throwback to the raver generation. We danced a lot, but in the raver style where you dance at the other person, rather than with them.

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Sean dancing with a girl

So it was a great way to end a trip. Sean and Seth headed west to Budapest, and for me there was only the long slog east back to Ukraine...

Monday, August 29, 2005

Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau (With Pics)

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One goes to Auschwitz to learn. I also went to teach: I taught the Diary of Anne Frank every year and while I had photos and stories from where Anne Frank lived, I had never been to where she had died. Like a previous visit to Dachau, I dealt with a lot of the horror by blocking it out and instead figuring out in my head how I would explain what I was seeing to my students.

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The entrance to Auschwitz I. Above the gate it says "Arbrecht Mach Frei". Work will make you free.

The first thing that got me was how preserved it was: in Dachau, all the barracks were stripped down for wood and little more than the foundations and outer wall remain. Most of Auschwitz is still how it was when the allies arrived.

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Barracks

It was a lot to take in. The connections keep getting more and more, too. A map showed the transportation paths to Aushwitz and one came straight from Lviv. I visited an abandoned synagogue in shovka, just outside of Lviv in Febuary. The Jews that once worshipped there were sent here. Now, the entire Jewish population of shovka is gone and the only people who enter the synagogue are random travelers that happen to introduced to the person with the key.

A picture of the synagogue can be seen

here



That's just the scale side of it. Going to Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau (it's actually two camps) is to learn the more personal side of it, have stories you don't want to hear, attrocity after attrocity pummeled into you by the tour guide. I thought I had heard of every torture possible, every evil a human could commit upon another, but there was more to learn and the stories just kept coming. I felt like someone was taking a chisel to my soul. That's not hyperbole: it was a steady growing pain somewhere beneath my heart until I finally just shut down. And then I had to remind myself that hearing about it is nothing compared to experiencing it and how pathetic was it for me to think "I don't want to deal with this" when so many had to deal with so much more?

It's the details that stab: the fact that the Nazis actually built a rotating table on rails so that they could move and turn the bodies efficiently before they could be slid into the ovens by a device that looked like the pump on a shotgun, turned upside down. Slide it forward, body is pushed into the oven. Slide it back, it's ready for a new body. I accept the emotions that lead to genocide within us, but my understanding is that they are divorced from intellect. The very presence of the devices is proof that someone rationally thought about how to effieciently dispose of a lot of bodies and that is what sickens me the most.

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Body turning device

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Body loading device

I showed almost no emotion for the whole tour. No one did. Our entire group of Anglophone men and women didn't shed a tear around one another. My breakdown finally came when, at the end, I climbed the guard tower, the one stradling the train tracks and seen in every Holocaust film.

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The watchtower

I looked out over the enormity of it and it wasn't even a rational thought. It was once glance and I had to leave quickly. I found a small field of wild wheat near the doors, went into it and cried for less than a minute.

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Walking into a gas chamber

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Tracks leading from the watchtower into the camp

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Sleeping palets

The Nazis decided not to waste anything and kept warehouses full of what was taken from the prisoners:

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Prothesis

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Human hair

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Cloth made from human hair

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Shoes

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Poland: Krakow Bike Tour (With Lots of Pics)

Sometimes, you can get fooled. A place has Pizza Hut and you assume: hey, it's not Ukraine. They're modern here. This is a major city in an EU country. Surely I can drink the water. Or place ice cubes into my Pepsi.

Which is the only thing I consumed that Sean and Seth had not, but they were not up all night puking their guts out every few minutes (which sucks all the more when the bathroom in your hostel is downstairs).

I waited about two hours to make sure that I was puking because of some kind of food poisoning rather than some other stomach problem, but when that two hours was up and I was still vomiting, in went the ciprofloxacin. Cipro is a serious antibiotic that the U.S. stockpiles in case of anthrax attack. It's also good to take if you consume any bad water or food, which is why it's in our Peace Corp medical kits and why it was in my backpack. A few hours later I settled out and managed to get a couple hours of sleep.

***
RANT: Feel free to skip

This is why I think antibiotics should not require a perscription. It's not like you can abuse them like painkillers and it's nice to have a supply when you really need them. I remember a roadtrip to Vegas getting completely sidetracked because I developed an ear infection that was painfully draining into my throat, preventing me from eating anything but soup. I knew exactly what I needed: amoxocillin. We finally found a walk-in clinic in Arizona. The doctor saw me for about ten seconds, then prescribed me: amoxocillin. Besides the $20 copay and the cost of the antibiotics, I later got a bill for $110 in the mail because I had not out-of-state medical coverage. It would have been nice for the FDA to let me make the informed call myself and save me the money. And while I realize antibiotics could be abused, taken for every sniffle, at least let there be some sort of certification program like CPR so that afterwards I got get them on my own. A doctor in the states may give you cipro a head of time if you tell him or her you're going to a non-first world country, but you'd still have to pay just to get the prescription.

***

Needless to say, I was pretty weakened in the morning, which is not a good state when the plan for the day is to take a bike tour of Krakow. I soldiered through because I knew that if I stayed at the hostel, I'd be perkier in a couple hours and annoyed that I had missed it.

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Seth, Sean and I on the bike tour. If I look a little worse for wear, it's because I was just getting over food poisoning

As is, it was a fantastic tour. I've learned that one of the first things to do in any major city where they are available is to take the bike tour. They tend to help you get your bearings, show you a lot of sites and tend to be hipper than any walking tour.

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Krakow, seen from Wawel Castle

Our guide, Dave, was an American who had been living in Krakow for seven years. He was knowledgeably, funny and just really good at his job. For instance, according to Dave (but confirmed by a guide book), Krakow is named after a knight called Krak. Yes, Krak. According to legend he cleverly slew a dragon, took the offered prize of the town leader's daughter and thusly became it's leader. Out of humilty, he decided to name the town after himself.

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A bit of Krakow archetecture

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Krakow's river

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Pigeons in Main Market Square

Krakow's Old Town is one of the most beautiful that I've seen. Ringed by a park, it's a huge collection of buildings from different periods in history. Most of it, unlike a lot of Eastern Europe, unscathed by World War II. In the center of Old Town is the Main Market Square, a huge expanse of cobblestones surrounded by cathedrals and buildings, carpeted by pigeons, tourists, performers, and vendors.

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Pigeon on my shoulder. I thought Seth had tapped my shoulder, but when I looked back, I saw this guy sitting there.

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I like the clash between contemporary and traditional with two women cooking up food in Main Market Square.

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A church in Main Market Square

As beautiful as Krakow's is, though, the city has a much darker side. When the Nazis left in retreat near the end of World War II, they would leave behind a decimated Jewish population and two of the largest concentration camps: Auchwitz and Auchwitz-Birkanau, where 1.5 million people died. The surviving Jews fled. There are so few Jews in Krakow today that Krakow's rabbi actually lives in New York.

When the Nazi's arrived, one of the first things they did was isolate the Jews in a walled ghetto. This is where they crossed into the ghetto:

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The bridge leading into the Jewish ghetto. The original was blown up by Nazis to slow the invading Soviets. This is one is modeled on the first.

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The only part of the ghetto wall still standing

In the ghetto the Jews lived and worked, traffic in and out being controlled by guards, food ration tossed over walls to whomever was lucky enough to be there. Non-Jewish people having to move through the ghetto to reach factories on the outskirts of town did so in guarded trolley-cars with shaded windows. This was to both prevent them from seeing the deterioration in the ghetto and/or to prevent them from providing the Jews with news or supplies. When the concentration camps were completed, the ghettos were emptied out.

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Where the Jews were rounded up to send to concentration camps

If you'll notice in the above photograph, people still live and work where the ghetto once was. In fact, people are living in the same buildings, the same rooms that once had an average of 9 Jews per apartment compressed into them. According to that stigma, said Dave, property values were extremely low and the ghetto is now what we would think of as a ghetto: an extremely economically depressed area. Few tourists ever made it out there, and it was dangerous to do so. The only marks of the history of the ghetto is the section of wall in the picture above and a single small plaque on the pharmacy next to this square. The plaque was to commemorate a Catholic pharmacist who did his best to help the Jews.

There are some stories of hope to come out of this, and one of the more famous was the story of Oskar Shindler, the protaganist in Steven Spielberg's Shindler's List. I never saw the movie, but would like to now. On the bike tour we went to the actual factory, which now houses commercial offices. One of them was for a snowboarding magazine company.

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Outside Shindler's factory

Shindler's story, in brief: Shindler was a buisnessman who came to Krakow during the war to make money. Buying a seized Jewish factory, he began making mess kits for the Nazis using Jewish slave labor. In an effort to keep up efficiency, he bought his workers extra rations and bribed Nazis to let them off of work details like street cleaning so that they could get to work on time. According to Dave, most of his early helping was entirely self-serving, and that the movie portrays him with too much empathy.

Still, Shindler became attached to his workers and began helping them more and more. When the Nazis began loosing, stopped buying mess kits and decided to move his factory equipment west in order to begin using it to make ammunition, Shindler paid a bribe to have his work force move with him and the equipment, sparing the lives of the workers, who would have gone to the concentration camps instead. He was given one night to draw up the names of all the workers and their family members who would be saved by the move. Hence, Shindler's List.

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More of the factory

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In the movie and in real life, one woman, who knew Shindler was a ladies man, dolled up to get his attention before begging him to save her family. These are the actual stairs where he appraised her before telling his secretary to let her come up to his office. He did save her family.

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The old Jewish cemetary. Because there is no Jewish community in Krakow to take care of it, it is overgrown. According to Dave, the similarity between the way these Jewish Orthodox headstones are carved and the top of the ghetto wall was done on purpose by the Nazis to demoralize the Jews

Luckily, not all the tour was that emotionally heavy. On to some other sites.

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Catholic church in Krakow

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Sean on the bike tour

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A monument to communism in front of a modern monument to capitalism: a mall

The bike tour got us way outside the historical center, where you knew few, if any tourists went, including past the above mall. We stopped at a gas station for snacks. After unsuccessfully experimenting with different--mostly healthy--things to see if they would stay in my stomach, it was only after puking up a lot more in the gas station bathroom and then munching, ironically, a bag of chips and drinking a gatorade that I felt better. The water, the salt and the carbs are what did it, and the chips actually absorbed a lot of whatever acids were raging. I finished out the bike tour in a much better mood.

The rest of the photos are from around Krakow. Enjoy.

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Seth and I inside Wawel castle

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Fire twirlers in Main Market Square

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Seth and I in people-packed Old Town. I'm still under the weather in this pic.

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Break dancers in Main Market Square

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Poland: Priceless Salt (With Pics of Priceless Salt!)

There's this thing called UNESCO. It's a big acronym. What it stands sounds kind of pompus so you can have fun making up words that it stands for instead. United Nymphomaniacs Emasculating Sychophantic Christian Oppressors is a possibility to get you started.

HINT: Google it if you really want to know what it means.

Unflaggingly Naming Everthing So Cool Organization is another possibility. It is not as funny as the raunchier options, but not far off the mark of what UNESCO actually does. Everything UNESCO names as a World Heritage Site is always pretty damn cool. Three entire sections of Budapest are WHSs, Spisky Hrad (the big ass castle in Slovakia) is one, as are the painted monastaries in Romania. All were worth visiting.

There may be a bit of bias in what's picked, though: if you look at a map of World Heritage Sites, they are mostly concentrated in Europe. Also, in a possible cultural middle finger to the USA, most of America's World Heritage Sites are national parks: the Grand Canyon, the Everglades, etc. In fact, the only USA WHS (more acronyms) actually produced by America society is Monticello. Hint: Monticello was Thomas Jefferson's home (don't feel bad if you didn't know that; I had to google it to make sure). But basically UNESCO seems to be saying that while Europe has made many things of cultural import, the only things worth preserving in America are those things that were there before we arrived.

In any case, bias aside, I have come to respect UNESCO's choices and try to check out World Heritage Sites whenever possible. So when I learned that one of UNESCO twelve most priceless treasures was in Poland, I decided that I had to see it.

It was a salt mine.

Yes, a salt mine. We'll get to it in a second.

I met up with two of my good friends in Peace Corps, Sean and Seth, in Krakow, Poland. They were heading west, coming from Lviv and going to Budapest. I was going in the exact opposite direction.

Let me say that Krakow is absolutely beautiful.

Never heard of Krakow? You will one day. More than once I've heard that Krakow is the next Prague and that Lviv is the next Krakow. That sounds really In-The-Know, but it just sums up the travelers philosophy: "if I didn't have to go through hell to get there, it wasn't worth going."

Prague, Krakow and Lviv are all amazing cities, but to a traveler they rank thusly: Prague was once the darling of the backpacker circuit but is now full of tourists and therefore must be disdained. Krakow is not as touristy but easy to get to due to EU subsidies, letting visiting backpackers feel special but not having suffered overmuch to do so (other than, *ahem*, getting chloroformed on a train). Lviv--plagued by visa, language, lodging, transportation and service problems--is only visited by the most hardy travellers, i.e. Australians and Peace Corps Volunteers. Actually, when I was in Lviv in Feburary, I didn't see a single non-Ukranian there. In fact, the last time a large group of tourists actually visited Lviv, they killed all the Jews and shipped back thousands of tons of topsoil to Germany. This probably explains the lack of hostels.

Yes, to a rough and rugged Ukrainian Peace Corps Volunteer, Krakow is not off the beaten path, but is instead a substitute for heaven, ripe with soft toilet paper, West Slavic language and cute Polish girls.

But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes, salt mines. We're getting to that.

So I met Seth and Sean in Krakow. This is me with Sean and Seth:

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I'm wearing the Prague tee-shirt that Anna bought me to make up for loosing my other one. And Carrie has already pointed out that I look scrawny compared to Seth and Sean, so you don't have to comment on it. Sigh. I hate having my self delusions shattered the harsh facts of reality.

That's part of the Krakow castle in the background (we're inside the walls). Krakow castle was listed as THE thing to see in Poland by the Let's Go travel guide, which either doesn't speak well of the rest of Poland, or speaks a lot about Let's Go's leanings towards hyperbole--and its inability to correctly report which of Budapest's baths are the gay ones.

But again I digress.

What a fun phrase. Who, I wonder, came up with this magic set of words that lets you ramble on unchecked and yet still be forgiven by a reader for your self-indulgent meanding simply by stating three little...

But I digress.

All this should be giving you the clue that there wasn't a lot to the salt mines.

Also, Let's Go was the one that said the salt mines were one of UNESCO's 12 most priceless treasures. The problem is, while the salt mines are on the world heritage list with several hundred other places, I have found no mention to a priceless treasures list outside of Let's Go. I'd like to know what the other 11 are, but I don't think I'll ever find out because I suspect that such a list doesn't really exist and am starting to really suspect that Let's Go is full of [expletive deleted].

Anyway, the castle was fun, it simply wasn't as remarkable or photogenic (the really important quality in a castle, defensibility be damned) as other castles I've been to. After seeing the castle, we hopped on a marshrutka (or, as the Polish call it, a "marshrutka") to the town of Wieliczka.

We were left at a grassy patch by the road and, after walking past some abandoned factories, found three boys in a cement culvert who managed to point us in the direction of the mines.

There, we found many brand new tour buses, forcing us to wonder just how Off-The-Beaten-Path this was. Answer: not very. I paid for our tickets with my Visa check card and then we were led by our English speaking guide down a set of 850 stairs (I kid you not) into the 350 km worth of tunnels that make up the salt mines. Also down there were a couple of underground lakes, so saturated that they simply could not absorb any more salt and are now impossible to drown in (well, almost; several Soviet soldiers were on one of the lakes in a rowboat. It overturned, trapping them underneath and pushing them under the water, where they then drowned. This is why communism failed).

These salt mines were once the source of great Polish wealth, back when you could receive your salary in salt because rotten food just didn't taste the same without it. Yes, yes, I know that's wrong. I know that salt was important because it was used for preserving meat, but I once had a seventh grade Language Arts teacher tell me the former answer when I asked her why salt used to be so valuable the Roman army was paid in it. It was only many years later that I realized she was as full of [explitive deleted] as the Let's Go guide.

Okay, now to the real reason these particular salt mines warranted UNESCO's attention: miners got bored and miners were religious. This led them to carve salt. Lots of salt. Into--mostly--religious statues. Down in these mines are dozens and dozens of statues carved out of salt, as well as several chapels, also carved out of salt.

I will have to admit the salt carvings were pretty cool. Ditto the chapels, which had chandeliers not made out of glass, but pure salt crystals. The coolest part, though,--the hippest, the most heater, the most sick, the most gnar--was the fact that you could lick the walls. They tasted salty.

Also, for a scare: the timbers supporting the roof of the tunnels (which was also salt) were 400 years old. Most people replace wood by then, but because the salt had petrified the wood, it was deemed safe to let the really, really, really old wood be the only thing that kept tons of salt from collapsing onto the heads of hundreds of tourists. Who's with me in trusting the assesment of mine saftey by a newly emerging, formerly-Soviet country? Anyone? Anyone?

And one last thing before we just get to the pictures, which you've no doubt skipped over all these words to see anyway. Some of the oldest sculptures (at 600 years old) had weathered away to almost featureless. This was in sharp contrast to other, newer, very beautiful sculptures had been intricately detailed in this very impermanent substance. I asked our guide what measures they were taking to preserve the newer (and by newer, I mean 150 years old) sculptures. "Nothing," she said. In other words, in 50 years, when Krakow is the new Prague and Lviv is the new Krakow, all those tourists won't get to see the same level of amazing details as I did. Which is why one tries to get a little off the beaten path.

But hopefully by then, they will have replaced the one four-person elevator that was the only route back to the surface. The tour was two hours. Wait time for the elevator? An hour and a half. So sometimes it's not bad when, like a red-headed stepchild complaining ther her food tastes bland and could really use some, um, pepper, the path is beaten.

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Sean, holding his hands under water pumped out of the mines. It looks like (insert Dr. Evil voice) liquid hot MAG-ma.

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Oh, yeah, the legend of the salt mines: a Polish princess was allowed to throw a ring and whatever the ring touched, that would be for her people. It landed in a field and when the peasants dug down, they found the salt that would bring so much wealth to Poland. This is the ring being returned to the princess. Actually, modern archeology shows that tribes had been mining the salt for thousands of years, but who needs scientific fact when you have a cool salt sculpture?

Image hosted by Photobucket.comOne of the chapels, carved entirely out of salt.

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A crucifix carved out of salt.

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The Last Supper carved out of salt. When Jesus said "take this bread and eat it", do you think any of the disciples added a certain condiment?

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Lastly, yours truly licking the salt