Night 3 - Night train to Lviv, Ukraine

Everyone had warned us about the trains in Eastern Europe, about how they were always late and crowded and slow and dirty and not air conditioned, and that even the first class wouldn't be as nice as German second class compartments. (And we did splurge for the first class, as it meant we had our own sleeping cabin, which seemed worth it with a baby, and wasn't all that expensive compared to German trains).

Well were we ever pleasantly surprised! The first night train we were on had really fabulous little cabins, complete with a little sink with running water that was cleverly folded away into a little cupboard. (I really wish we'd taken a picture of that!) The conductors were also dressed more like flight attendants, and came around shortly after we started to offer coffee or tea, the latter of which came with slices of lemon in these really cool glass mugs with pewter handles.

Here's the view from the bottom bunk, where Béla and I were cozily snuggled in together. At first this didn't seem like it was going to work so well, mostly because the bed slanted slightly, and a bit the wrong way (i.e. so that I was worried about rolling out in the night). The bar on which the folding mattress rested was a bit loose, which wasn't at all dangerous, but meant that it leaned a bit outward. It was remedied by shoving Jeremi's sandals between the bed and the bar, and we slept find after that. That's our big backpack wedged up over the door, which will be relevant later.
I sort of wish we'd taken more pictures of our compartment, but we were really ready to get right to sleep. The train went from something like 10:00 to 6:00, which sounds like we were on board for 8 hours, but it was only really 7 hours because there's a time change, and it took us an hour to get Béla to sleep after he'd explored the train compartment fully, and beyond that we were crossing a border in the middle of the night, so we knew we'd have to wake up for that. What I didn't realize is just how long we'd have to be awake for that...

First the conductor came around and knocked on every door so we would wake up and open our doors, and he handed around entry and exit forms that we had to fill out. (Because Béla has his own passport rather than being included in my passport, which isn't very common in Eastern Europe, I filled one out for him as well.) Then we waited a while. Here's Béla waiting for the border guard to come around, passport at the ready. (Yup, his feet were really dirty.)
First came the Polish border guard, who collected all our passports so that we could get exit stamps. We waited a while, and another border guard brought them back. Again, we waited.
Next came a Ukrainian border guard in military fatigues who took away all our passports and the completed forms. He didn't understand why there were three passports but only two people, so we showed him the sleeping baby, and he laughed at his passport photo, and gave us Béla's form back. Then we waited a while longer. Next came a woman from customs, who was going through peoples' bags. Because the big backpack was shoved up over the door she didn't notice it, which saved us having to go through everything. (There was nothing of interest in there anyhow.) Then we waited a while longer. Finally, a different Ukrainian border guard came, this one in a fancier uniform, and gave back the passports with entry stamps inside, and the entry part of our immigration forms removed.

Finally, we could get back to sleep. All in all we were awake for at least two hours at the border, which made the 6:00 am arrival in Lviv seem all the earlier. But for that, you'll have to wait for the next post.

Day 3: The Salt Mines

The next day we were taking a night train to Lviv, leaving at something like 10 pm, so we still had the whole day to explore the city. After a nice breakfast, we headed to the train station to store our luggage, knowing that we didn't want to cart it around all day. From there we planned on visiting the Wieliczka Salt Mines, which aren't so very far away from Krakow. These salt mines are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and had been a place I'd wanted to visit since I read about them as a kid. (Yes, I really do love salt...) The guide book (Lonely Planet Eastern Europe) indicated that there should be minibuses leaving from a given intersection downtown, and we decided to go and check out if these minibuses looked remotely babysafe, and then decide if we were going based on that. But first we stopped at a little market and bought some food for a quick little lunch, trying out some street food (like long open-faced subs that we saw everywhere), and these seemingly homemade molded pastries that were being sold by women from little carts in the street:
We were surprised by how much they were charging for these little "pastries", and then surprised by how heavy they were... And of course it's because they weren't pastries at all, but rather smoked cheese. It was really delicious, but we probably wouldn't have bought quite as much had we known it was cheese.

And then on to the salt mines... or so we thought. Lonely Planet let us down in a pretty big way on this one - there were no longer minibuses of any description going to Wieliczka, and none from the intersection in questions. We still wandered around for quite a while trying to find them though, before we asked at the tourist information centre, where they very helpfully gave us information about how to take a city bus out to the town, which was only about a 40 minute ride away. Getting to the bus stop was a bit of a fiasco, mostly because we somehow lost the map they gave us but thought we could do it from memory, and ended up walking around a big block and seeing the bus we wanted drive by us three times while we tried to find the stop. Eventually we did though (after getting directions at a giant fancy mall that had more high end stores than most airports), and we were off!

Luckily we got there shortly before an English-language tour was due to begin, so we didn't have to wait too long upon arrival. We'd already checked the stroller at the train station, as we figured that salt mines were probably not very stroller friendly, which proved to be a good decision, as the tour began by descending 378 stairs to get to the bottom. By the end my knees were really feeling the extra 25 pounds of Béla in the carrier! Check out the view down the centre of the stairwell - it looked like it went on forever...
Yes, mom, I'm a little sherpa.
There were lots of warnings to bring a jacket because it was cold underground, but we found it remarkably comfortable. (We'd read it would be 14 C, but I think it was more like 18 C.)
Here's one of the many statues in one of the chambers we visited. Everything there was made out of solid salt - the carvings, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, with the exception of some wooden support structures. (Wood keeps really well there because all the salt prevents rot.) This statue is of Copernicus, who was, of course, Polish.
These statues tell the legend of the founding of the mine, something about a noblewoman throwing her golden ring down the shaft, and then the riches of the salt deposits being discovered. In this and other pictures you get an idea of how dark the salt rock is - it's something like 92 % NaCl, but the impurities make it look really dark, and it's sometimes called "green salt". Naturally it's refined before use.
Here there were some stalactites of pure salt, really long ones, that reminded me of crystal-growing "experiments" with salt water and hanging strings as a kid.
Here's a chandelier in one of the many chapels. The "glass" in the chandelier is also salt, but it's been purified to appear clear rather than grey-green.
Despite the dark appearance of the "stones", they really taste like salt. Mooo...
This is a bit hard to see, but it's a statue of a miner doing a special job where they'd try to burn off methane build-up using lanterns on long poles. Naturally a very dangerous job, with lots of casualties, and no longer necessary in the still-functioning part of the mine thanks to modern technologies.

There were lots of little models showing how things used to be done in the mine, including the use of horses underground.
Along this particular section of wall you could see how cylinders were drilled in to break off chunks, reminding me of granite rock cuts in Northern Ontario.
One of the more narrow white-washed passages...
Hard to see, but here there was a view down a sort of canyon in the series of tunnels and chambers where you could see down something like 70 meters. Of course it's rather dark, and we're not the best photographers.
Here's a set of the original stairs used by the miners, which were carved out of salt. Of course they get rather slippery when wet and wear down over time, so they've replaced most of them with wood for the tourists.
Here's an underground stream running through the mine, with something like 18% salt in the water (saturated in any case, I don't remember the exact figure).
Hard to see here, but the water was actually sort of a greenish colour. It looks rusty here just because the vessel is rusting (of course).
This room had carvings of the little gnome-like spirits that the miners believed lived underground in the mine.
This was one of the smaller chapels, one of more than a dozen built by the rather religious miners over the years.

But that little one was nothing - this is the Chapel of St. Kinga, which was truly breathtaking. My favourite part was the "tiles", which were designs routed into the solid salt floor.
There were also lots of other carvings though, like in any church, with bas relief reproductions of the last supper, and a giant statue of Pope John Paul II.
Béla loved it, of course. He was quite a hit on our tour in fact, and coped well with the three hour tour, which is longer than he likes to be in the carrier these days. At least in the big chapel I could let him out to run around.
That's the Last Supper on the left...
From there the tour continued, and we went to the Weimar chamber, which was cool for us because Weimar is a city really close to Jena (about 25 km away). Goethe is a really famous German poet and writer who lived and worked in Weimar and surroundings, but he actually came to visit the mine in his earlier career, when he was a German civil servant and was coming to inspect the mine operations. Here he is now!
And here's the sign for the Weimar chamber, which had water in the bottom and a really high ceiling with wonderful acoustics, and we were treated to a piece of music by Chopin (who was Polish) while we contemplated the beauty (and we tried to keep Béla respectfully quiet - he found the echo in the giant chamber rather fun).
At the end of the tour we had supper at the restaurant at the bottom of the mine, which serves up traditional Polish food cafeteria-style, and is meant to be a bit like what the miners get in their cafeteria. Honestly, the food was delicious and quite affordable, and Béla ran around like a mad man, burning off his excess energy, while we enjoyed our meal.

After that we headed toward the exit, which led us by the big event hall with the fancy dining room, shown here. This place is rather classy, and is famous for a big New Year's Eve ball, as well as private functions, including weddings.



Thank God we didn't have to walk back up the stairs! Instead there was a cage-style elevator that brought us up, and which freaked the hell out of Béla. He screamed from the moment the doors closed until the moment we exited, which was actually a pretty long time given that we were 125 m underground. I'm not sure if it was the darkness or the claustrophobia or the creepy elevator operator who he was smooshed in next to, but he settled down as soon as we exited. I haven't noticed him being nervous or upset in other small spaces, so maybe it was just a one-off. And even if he has an irrational fear of cage elevators in salt mines operated by creepy men, he'll probably be able to make it through life without it holding him back too much...

After that we took the bus back into the city, stopped at the high-end mall to pick up some eats for the train, grabbed our luggage, and headed on to Lviv. We'll tell you all about the train trip in the next post.

Day 2 Krakow's Vavel Castle

After getting off the noisiest train ever, we made our way to our hostel, the Secret Garden, hidden away in the former Jewish quarter of Krakow. It was a nice place where all the rooms had been given names pertaining to a fruit. We were in the Raspberry Elation room. We got in pretty late so we went to bed right away after a long day of travel. The next day we headed out to see downtown Krakow. The old city and market square are surrounded by a nice park, which makes a nice separation for the locals from the annoying tourists. Here is Béla sleeping next to a pretty cool fountain. It has three arms that shoot water at a big slab of cement. Slightly less conventional than the usual squirt-water-directly-up models.

Here is Julia in the market square. At two hundred meters squared (not 200m², twice the size of our apartment, but 200x200=40 000m²) it is the largest medieval town square in Europe and surrounded by beautiful buildings. In the very center is the old cloth market building, behind Julia. It now houses a bunch of souvenir shops that actually don't look all that tacky. They have a lot of traditional crafts including woodwork, amber jewelery, embroidery, and little dolls.


Here is Béla going at some corn on the cob that we bought from a vendor on the square. He did pretty well on it.

And as you can see here, he loved using the cob as a teething toy. Zombie Béla will eat your corn!
At one of the squares corners is the St. Mary's Basilica, a brick Gothic church where a trumpeter signals the hour with a song that is cut off mid note to commemorate the famous 13th century trumpeter, who was shot in the throat while sounding the alarm before the Mongol attack on the city


There were little carts all over the place selling sesame-covered bagel-like bread, which I can't bring myself to call bagels because they don't really resemble either the Montreal or the New York version of the food. Still, they were tasty, cheap, and ubiquitous, so we had a few along the way. They also sold little tiny bagels on a string, and we saw some kids wearing them, so we got a mini bagel necklace for Béla to wear. He tore into them, devouring only a few completely, but taking chunks out of almost all of them. He was quite pleased.


For lunch we found a nice place that served traditional Polish food. Julia had the perogies, I had the mixed grill and Béla had fun at a nearby fountain. There were many children playing with the several jets coming out of the ground in front of the fountain. Bela did really well with this. He is not crazy about having fun with water and is usually very cautious in a pool or the bath tub. But he went right up to these and splashed around and didn't even cry when he was accidentally splashed by other kids.






Then we made our way to Wawel (pronounced Vavel) Castle. A short walk from downtown, it is perched on a hill on the banks of the Vistula, the river that runs through Krakow, and houses a cathedral and several museums. They only let a certain number of people into the museums a day so by the time we got there we only got to see the state rooms and I went to see the cathedral. Here is the entrance to the castle, a long ramp going up onto the defensive position.

There was also a Dragon!! More on that later



Behind Julia is the cathedral, cathedral museum and parts of the rest of the castle. We stopped here to catch our breaths and let Béla sleep a little after his mini-bagel orgy. The cob is also in there somewhere. (Note from Julia: After he awoke and we took away his bagel necklace I found out that these little bagels were actually rather sweet, unlike their larger sesame-covered kin. As I'd spent the past six months carefully guarding Béla from any refined sugars, I was mortified, but I needn't have worried - by the end of the trip he'd be eating far worse...)
I went to check out the cathedral while Julia stayed with Béla since there were a lot of awkward stairs packed with tourist that we didn't feel like carrying him up. The Cathedral was nice with many gilded decoration and fancily carved wood. Then we went on to the state rooms. In each room they had a loosely wood-framed map on a lectern describing the antiques in the room. Béla loved to grab these and tear them apart from the carrier that Julia was wearing. After a couple times he wasn't allowed to go near them any more, but this also meant that Julia couldn't get near enough to read the interpretive signs, which is something that she loves. The room were pretty grandiose, often with interesting paintings and designs on the ceiling. One had deep squares cut out and squares in the middle of the room had a bunch of carved heads looking down at you, quite surprising. Another few had leather wall paper, which Julia noticed. Unfortunately we weren't permitted to take photos inside, and didn't want to push our luck after the wooden sign fiasco. Here is a picture of the courtyard.
Here's a picture from the court yard looking through the wall and over the outer wall at a few tall church steeples.
On the way to the bathrooms outside of the courtyard we saw a couple of strangely inclined benches. They were made to sit a little farther down that street where the incline is much greater but someone had dragged them up.
After all that, Julia went dragon slaying in the dragons den. I'll let Julia interject with her comments on the den, Julia:

We were all supposed to go to the Dragon's Den, but unfortunately there was an incredibly long spiral staircase heading down into it, which just wasn't practical with a stroller. I went ahead then on my own, unfortunately without the camera. As the stairs wound down it got cooler and cooler, until the walls were dripping with condensation. Eventually it led into a natural cave at the base of the hill, which exited right onto the riverbank, where I could wait for Jer and Béla. Now back to Jeremi.

Meanwhile, me and Béla went the long way out of the castle to avoid the pesky dragons. Little did we know that it was waiting outside it's den for us, where we were supposed to meet Julia. Much in the style that Béla defeats the cat, he went in to pull the fire breathing monstrosity's scaly tail. Here he is getting the drop on it (see lower left).
And, yes, it did actually breath fire. Every couple minutes a flame would burst out of it's mouth.

And the peasants rejoiced frolicking around the defeated dragon.

This is one of the castle's towers seen from the river.
Then we went back to the Raspberry Room for a diaper party/drop off our souvenir loot, before going to look for one of the kosher restaurants recommended by the hostel.
Béla didn't quite make it there and slept through the meal. Nice for us, quiet diner, but unfortunately this started a bit of a trend where Béla would fall asleep every time we stopped at a restaurant. This means that we had to find other times to feed him and that the breast milk demands went up.
We had a lovely kosher meal; Julia ordered a bean and buckwheat stew that although salty was very good not to mention that it came in a giant portion, which meant we could bring some back to the hostel for Béla to eat when he awoke. (Yes, I know, salty food is terrible for babies. Didn't you already read about the sugar-bagels? We're terrible parents!) I had goose necks stuffed with chicken livers. Julia was thrilled to have Haroseth for dessert, bringing back old Seder memories.

Also noteworthy is how hot it was, or at least how hot we thought it was. It was actually only in the low 30s that day. Little did we know what crazy temperatures would be in store for us as our trip went on. As you read the following posts, it will become apparent why I say "only in the low 30s". The next day we went mining. Stay tuned for day 3.

Eastern European tour: Day 1 Jena-Krakow

To help deal with the overwhelming amount of pictures and information, we've decided to break our vacation up into days. This makes the first post rather boring, however, since it was almost entirely a travel day. We left Jena at 8:45 am, and didn't arrive in Krakow until around 9:30 pm after taking four trains. We also have almost only a few pictures from this day, including this young traveller waiting on the platform in Großheringen, just north of Jena, who looked as if he were heading out on a round-the-world tour by himself.

The train left a bit before Béla's usual waking time, so we were packed and ready to leave while he was still sound asleep. So we wrapped him in a blanket and got him into the stroller without waking him up, and he only woke later to find himself without any pants on, waiting on a train platform. He took this all in stride of course, which I don't think I would, in his position.
This was our first train of the day, which had a small-child-compartment, in which we found a sleeping train employee, which was sort of unusual. You can see him there in the background, after he woke up. (Usually this compartment is only for families with small kids.)
Overall the day went off without a hitch, which is all you can ask of a travel day. We had an hour to kill in Berlin so we had a nice picnic in a park near the train station inside old prison walls. From there we were on a train to Warsaw, of which we saw only the rather grim train station as we ran for a tight connection to Krakow. This train was by far the worst of our trip, though we didn't know it at the time. Everyone had warned us about the poor quality of eastern European trains, but this was really the only train that seemed unusually bad. I've never been in such a noisy train, and when it went over certain sections of track it shook back and forth so violently that you had to hold on. It's hard to explain just how rough a ride it was. (Béla found it exciting, after he woke from a long nap during which the rocking and vibrations seemed to help him sleep.) We'll tell you more about Krakow in our next post.