Week two-ish in Austria and Poland

Tonight is a quiet night in our Vienna apartment as Harley (Happy 11th Birthday!) and Fiona are with their Grandma Arlene in Salzburg for the next few days. Arlene arrived a week ago Monday and we've done our best to keep her occupied. During the work week last week, we toured some of the elegant Vienna Inner Ring, including St. Stephan's Cathedral (Stephansdom, first founded in 1147),

Peterskirche, in the Baroque style, and walked around the courtyards of the Hofburg Palace. On Wednesday night we went to a Mozart concert at the Musikveiren. Our seats were not optimal for actually seeing the players, who were dressed in period costumes (who knew the second row balcony seats should be avoided) but we enjoyed the music nonetheless. On Thursday we toured Schloss Schonbrunn (pictures on the opposite page), a palace outside the Vienna city center and historical home of the Habsburg monarchy. The grounds of the palace included formal gardens, a labyrinth, and the Gloriette, a hillside monument created by Empress Maria Theresia. The view of the city is from the Gloriette.

On Friday we had dinner in a most unusual location: this was the first time I've eaten pierogis 110 meters underground. We had driven to Krakow, Poland for the weekend, about five hours away, and we toured the Wieliczka salt mines. The salt mines were amazing: they had been operational for over six hundred years, and on the tour we took Friday evening, we saw kilometers of passageways on three different levels (the tour began with a descent of 800 steps, equaling 64 meters) and one could actually lick the walls and it would taste salty. On this tour we saw numerous carvings made from rock salt, and some of the chambers, a maximum of 36 meters tall, had been transformed into chapels, restaurants, gift shops, a playground, and we saw them setting up for a boxing match. We stayed in an Old City apartment in Krakow right on the city square. Krakow' city center is medieval in character, but it was vibrant, bustling, and lined with restaurants featuring outdoor seating with heaters. The original city cloth market, built in 1555, still stands.

On Saturday we visited the sites of Ww2 concentration camps Birkenau and Auschwitz, where 1.5 million people were murdered. This visit brought the concepts of enormous gravity, incomprehensible, tragedy, and horror to the fore. We walked the periphery of Birkenau and we were tired, which just illustrated how large the camp was. At Auschwitz the room that gripped my heart was filled, filled with shoes taken from the prisoners. I found myself walking a line between placing what we saw in my own understanding and assisting my children, with lesser life experience, to digest what was surrounding them. We stated their job as being witnesses to history. It was a difficult day for all of us emotionally, but I do not regret taking the opportunity to see it. May the experience grant us all diligence in ensuring history does not repeat itself.

On Sunday we returned to the mines for a second tour...the Miners' Tour! We had to suit up in coveralls and hard hats and carry lamps and a carbon monoxide converter. On this route we got to pretend we were miners and take on some of the tasks we would have done: Fiona was a cartographer, and Harley got to be an advance explorer. We all got the chance to break open rock formations containing salt, and we all passed the qualifying jump over a leather apron at the end. We can now get jobs in the mines if we wish. One thing I found fascinating was the use of horses in the mines during the 16th-19th centuries: horses were lowered in a fortified harnesses into the mines and spent the rest of their lives underground. The air in the mines now is excellent quality for the areas the tourists visit, and the lights we carried were efficient, but I can't imagine the shafts several hundred years ago.

We returned to Vienna and I made it to the university on Monday, but Monday evening we celebrated Harley's birthday with some sparkler candles, fancy-schmancy desserts, and I must share the card I had been carrying in my luggage for two months...a summer purchase at Target. I just thought it was perfect...