Kayla Tate is in her second year at Southwestern University. This semester she is studying abroad in London, and is writing a blog for SouthwesternPirates.com to give you an inside look at her experience. Below is her fourth entry.
Previous posts:
• Introducing Kayla Tate
• Experiencing London
• Making adjustments
Hey guys!
As you may know from my last post, last weekend I had the incredible opportunity to go to Poland with my roommate/teammate Madison Godleski! For those of you who don't know, my dad is working on creating a new programming language, so he works with people who live all over the world. He's gotten to know one of the other creators, named José, pretty well over the years, and he invited Maddie and I to stay with him and his family in Krakow.
On the first day, José took us to the city center so we could spend all day sightseeing and wandering around town. We walked through markets, cathedrals, and we even got to see the ruins of a castle! Poland sits on one of the world's largest deposits of amber, so there were entire stores specifically for amber jewelry around every single corner. I'm pretty sure that Maddie and I went into every single amber store we saw, because we enjoyed looking at the jewelry so much. We saw everything from pendants the size of my palm to footlong strings of tiny amber beads. There were also carved chunks of amber in the shape of various kinds of animals as well as amber carved to look like flowers. Before I came to Poland, I had only seen the typical honey-colored amber. However, in Krakow I learned that amber can also be yellow, dark green and even bright red! It was absolutely spectacular.
Another one of my favorite moments from our first day was discovering a pastry called a chimney cake. Chimney cakes are massive hollow pastries that are covered on the inside with anything from Nutella and hazelnuts and lemon curd and coconut flakes. On the outside they have a light coating of sugar and they are typically served fresh out of the oven. The one I had was coated in Nutella and hazelnuts. It was by far the best pastry I have ever eaten, and my mouth is watering just remembering eating it. A lot of people say Polish food is bland, but I wholeheartedly enjoyed every single thing I ate in Poland!
One of the major tourist attractions in Krakow is the Wieliczka Salt Mine. Every person that I had talked to before going to Krakow had suggested that we go check it out, so we did! It was absolutely spectacular. To give you a scale of how large this salt mine is, our tour was two hours of constant walking and we only saw less that one percent of the mine. It's completely massive! Even though most of the mine is gray, our guide assured us that every inch of it is pure salt, and that when it is crushed it looks just like white table salt. On our tour we saw three different underground salt water lakes. One of the lakes was so big that it has held a windsurfing contest before. Even though our guide pointed that out, he didn't explain how people could have a windsurfing contest on a windless underground lake.
My personal favorite cavern that we saw in the mines was the Chapel of St. Kinga. Because work in the mines was originally very dangerous, the workers constructed chapels throughout the salt mine so they could pray for their safety throughout the work day. Although there are many chapels, by far the grandest is the Chapel of St. Kinga. There were multiple gorgeous chandeliers made of salt crystals, intricate carvings of biblical scenes on the walls of the cavern and perfectly placed hexagonal tiles of salt for the floor. The chapel is so beautiful that it is actually a popular place to get married even though it is exactly 101 meters underground. The thing that shocked me the most about the chapel is that all but one of the carvings on the walls were done by men who just worked in the mines. The one carving that was done by a professional was done by a miner who was sent to art school after completing the other carvings because his artistic talent was too good to ignore. After he completed art school, he came back and created the last carving!
Overall, it was an amazing experience and I can't wait for our next adventure! This upcoming weekend we're going on an overnight excursion with our program to Bath and Stonehenge, and I can't wait! I'm so glad we're getting the chance to explore England outside of London.
– Kayla