October 7, 2018

Mines, Castles and General Conference too!

Well, we’re a few days late this week for reasons I’ll explain below but suffice it to say that this letter started out being typed while in the back seat of a car being driven by our temple president Erlacher as we traverse the western regions of Poland with a beautiful sunset on the horizon. It turned out to be really difficult typing in the dark on bumpy roads so its being finished the next day after we finally arrived home.

We began our new month and new season after the two weeks break by being reassigned as veil coordinators which follows working on initiatory ordinances and in the baptistry for a few months, but brings us back to a task we did for a couple of months already, so we felt well trained and ready to go. Two couples get the assignment and one gets three out of the five sessions scheduled daily and the other gets the remaining two, each session alternating coordinators. So, we lucked out with the three sessions at 8, 10:30 and 1:00. The two other sessions at 9 and 11:30 were reserved for a group of members who come every couple of months from Czechoslovakia. They are lovely, dedicated saints who we have come to know very well. The new challenge, however, this time, was that they only brought 4 temple workers with them, each couple leading one of the sessions so that left a bit of a dearth in people who could work at the veil speaking Czech. Having gotten a bit of a reputation in Hungarian and Romanian, it was decided to see how I’d do reading Czechoslovakian! I’d had a little bit of help learning how to pronounce Hungarian, and Romanian didn’t seem to be too bad. It’s also pretty easy to read Italian and Spanish as they pretty much pronounce the way they’re written. But that isn’t exactly the case with Czech and even after several attempts, I’m afraid I was really slaughtering the language. But fortunately, they seemed to be able to recognize what I was attempting to say and most appreciated the effort to say things in their own language.

So, our first day back was Tuesday, October 2, a great German holiday, The Day of German Unification. It celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as the reunification  of East and West Germany back in 1989, A little bit like the 4th of July, right?  Of course, no temple is open on the 4th of July in the States, right? So, we might have expected to get an extra day of vacation, right? Wrong! A holiday is a holiday, nobody has to work, and it makes for a great opportunity to come to the temple! The day was as busy as we’ve ever seen it. Every session was stock full to the point of putting extra seats in the rooms. And instead of just doing five or six attempts at Czech, I probably had the wonderful opportunity of doing it a dozen times or more!

Which brings us to the past weekend. We did get the opportunity for a day off from the temple on Saturday because of General Conference. Of course. the Saturday morning session doesn’t begin here until 6:00 PM so we could have had our normal Saturday hours without disturbing the conference sessions at all, but apparently the decision was made to close the temple for the entire day. It was therefore decided by a few of us, 4 couples exactly including our temple president and matron, to take the opportunity of a three-day weekend to travel to Cracow, Poland. Here are the famous Wieliczka Salt Mines as well as the original middle ages castle, Wawel, where the Polish kings ruled the country until attacked by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

We got away Saturday morning early by 7 AM with tour reservations in English scheduled for 2 PM. That gave us time to get to a very nice reserved apartment/home with 4 bedrooms, eat lunch and have a delightful tour through a huge salt mine that shows itself off to over a million people a year. It was about a 2 ½ hour tour plus an additional guided tour through a portion of the mine labelled as a museum. It is quite a fascinating attraction dating back to the 1500’s. We’ve been through a few salt mines in the past including Hallstatt and Salzburg but this one really has been outfitted for the tourists. There used to be over a thousand miners who worked here and the tour starts by walking down about 200 steps. From there it gets steadily deeper and deeper. The upper parts of the mine date back the farthest, and the deeper one goes, the more recent the excavations. Huge caverns have been excavated and there were even two or three worship rooms where they no doubt could worship before otherwise breaking the sabbath. Interestingly, there was quite a bit of memorializing to Pope John Paul II who originated from Poland. He apparently visited the mine at least three times and probably conducted services while there. They have created several unique displays to demonstrate the work of the miners and there are apparently still over 500 workers assigned to maintain the mine though mining operations apparently ceased around 2007.

Here are a couple of displays demonstrating how the miners worked and even one depicting men gathering salt prior to the real start of the mining operation in the early middle ages. Here is one of the worship room displays

and a memorial to Pope John Paul II who was clearly their patron saint.

We got back to the house in time to tune in to President Nelson’s opening remarks about the changes in the Sunday schedule and the new emphasis on correlation with our home study programs. We enjoyed the whole session and reserved the Saturday afternoon session for Sunday morning. We tried to watch the Women’s session after that, but it hadn’t yet been set up, so we had to wait a bit, but we did hear the entire Sunday morning session and the “Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square” broadcast later that day. We will get the Sunday afternoon session next Sunday at our chapel, but we did get the news about the 12 new temples. I’m not sure if the 10 day fast for the sisters includes normal emails, so you might have to get this from your husbands, brothers, sons or other brethren in the meantime. At any rate, we all went for a nice Sunday walk in the afternoon, so we didn’t seem to find time to write our normal epistle on Sunday with all of the other general conference activities going on.

It took us about five hours to drive from Freiberg to Cracow, so we figured if we left by 12 or 1 on Monday we’d get back in good time by around 6 or so that night. We decided to spend the morning after breakfast seeing Castle Wawel mentioned above. We were further blessed to find out that admission to the castle is free on Mondays. So after packing up our two cars, we headed over to the castle and learned a little bit by hanging out around English speaking tour guides. There was a nice statue of a terrible dragon that used to threaten the inhabitants of castle Wawel and retired into a deep cave beneath the castle which we didn’t make an effort to explore.  Every few minutes the dragon emitted a fiery blast from its mouth, but I never was able to catch it.

 

The dragon was apparently not to be defeated by multiple brave knights and armed groups of men. But the hero of the legend was a young shoemaker who filled a lamb with Sulphur and when the dragon devoured it, it exploded and saved the endangered city. Lots of dragons were for sale all around every souvenir shop but I guess we weren’t motivated enough to obtain one. Pictured next is the exterior of the main castle complex.

After enjoying the morning exploring the castle and its many charms, we opted to try for a genuine Polish restaurant for lunch. We should have been wiser for Polish restaurants are a lot like what we experience in Germany. While the food is delicious and well prepared it can take up to an hour to get service, especially with a large group. So we finally hit the road about 1:30 PM.

Even so, we felt we’d probably make it back home by 6:30 or so. Not so. Traffic was terrible and the German word for a traffic jam is perfect, “Stau”. We found plenty of it. We did have a GPS in the car and it was tuned in to what highways were blocked and how to get around them. So off we went on several little tangents and side roads. Referring back to the beginning of this epistle, it got darker and darker with little relief from the highway congestion and by the time we finally, gratefully arrived home it was 10 PM and this letter is being completed on Tuesday afternoon after a full day back at work in the temple.  In spite of the hassle and major delays, we were all still grateful for the experience and are looking forward to finishing the rest of the General Conference as we get the time.

Mom: Let it be said that in spite of all the terrible traffic, (I’ve never seen so many lines and lines of trucks of every kind on the freeways), we had a great time with the other senior missionary couples traipsing around salt mines and castles. You would never know that we are all supposed to be in our older years of life, as we have so much fun with each other. After so many hours on the road we were grateful to get back to our temple haven.

Loved the parts of conference we got to hear and are excited for the new programs to start in January.

Love, hugs and prayers,

Grammy, Grampa, Mom, Dad, Elder and Sister Parker