Working at the Salt Mine

Cracow's been around for a while.

Salt was super valuable a long time ago, and even before the spice
trade (remember that?). Food tasted bad back in the day, water was
dirty, and people were stinky.

Salt is sal in Spanish. Sal can become salorio for a person who works
with salt, or is a miner of salt (not an exact translation) Lots of
Poles worked in this mine, which was found by drilling into a salty
pool on the surface. Suddenly, Polish food was the best in the world
(not really). But, the king in the area took full advantage of this,
and made tons of money, and influence by doling out this salt to
miners and controlling the sale of salt.

The 2 kilo stipend that he allowed the miners to take from the mine
(in addition to his wage) was called his salorio also. From this we
get the word Salary.

Cool, eh?

We went a couple of hundred meters into the earth, through a huge
ballroom (see the pictures) and tons of passages.

No slaves worked this mine. No prisoners worked this mine. Miners here
were happy and rich. The Poles are proud of this, rightfully.

Amazingly, I got an email from Patrick McDonough of Braintree, MA
telling about how he also has hit this mine (back in 2006). You are
right Pat, it was super cool.

It was 14 degrees down there. Nice and cool and we were sad to get
back up to the surface and the hot weather up there.

Oh, and a side comment. There are wasps in Central Europe, and they
are all over the food everywhere. They don't look like the cute little
honey bees. They look like yellow jackets or wasps. They are annoying,
and I wish they would buzz off.