Central Salt Lake City

The first thing anyone thinks of when they hear "Salt Lake City" is of course Mormons and/or their temple. So I felt it was only right we go visit it. Luckily there was a free shuttle from our campground to Temple Square so we took that. I was worried the tours would cost money, but everything was free there… soon became clear why.

The shuttle bus is run by the church, and when we arrived they showed us the way to our tour guides, who were also of the Mormon church. The guides were all females, 21-24 years old, and always in pairs. Turns out this is part of their "mission" work. The young males go off to distant places to door knock, and the females, it appears, are turned into tour guides.

We were given a fairly quick tour of their extensive campus. One of the people in our group was determined to pick a fight with them and had done his homework on every little flaw in their religion (which honestly isn't hard…) but came across as a bit of a rude prat!

The temple itself is off bounds, but everything else is open access. The temple itself is amazing, and in the bright SLC sun was blinding. We were shown into one of the visitor centres which had simply amazing floor to ceiling artworks of the universe. I was a bit confused as to what the mural was depicting; after all many religions had issues with the idea of a universe at first. I thought maybe it was illustrating a journey to heaven or something… nope, it's just an amazing painting of the universe (complete with space clouds?!). I guess I should have expected that a towering statue of Jesus would be at the centre of it…

Naturally this was the perfect time to use my fisheye, which was safe and sound back in the car.

The temple was so huge I couldn't get it into one shot, so I have only this "artsy" shot to offer…

Everywhere we went the abundance of money and wealth was clear, but with a 10% tithing across several million members… the maths is fairly obvious. Nowhere was this more obvious than in their conference centre, which was funded entirely from credit (i.e. no borrowed money) and can seat 21,000 people in one room. That would be 30 or 40 packed school halls.

This is the view from the second tier, which is entirely cantilevered. Every single one of those little things is a seat. Very hard to get a sense of scale, but when I walked into the hall my eyes did funny things as they tried to work out what was going on. One is basically focusing at infinity, inside , which seems to throw the brain into a bit of a loop.

The money was obvious here; every seat with a perfect view, an amazing lighting system, state of the art ventilation system (dead quiet, super cool), etc etc. Then we were taken onto the roof…

… because naturally every roof should have a garden. Especially one that takes a good quarter hour to walk around!

There was also a simply massive painting of Jesus appearing on the American continent, surrounded by a bunch of distinctly un-Indian looking people. Never mind, that's their belief; what got me was how do you paint a painting which is about twice as tall as you, and many meters long??? Can you even get a canvas that size? I guess when money is no object you always can!

(Note how the painting towers above the doorway)

We were the only non-mormons on this part of the tour, though the rest of our tour group were, well, interesting characters. One was clutching a disposable camera like it was her ticket to Heaven. Another had a fascinating black/white hair mixture, a bit like a skunk really! I didn't sniff her… so can't comment on that how true the likeness was.

One that that did impress me about the Mormon religion is that one of their central teachings is that people are free to believe in their own gods, and that just because you aren't Mormon, doesn't mean you won't go to heaven (side note: another teaching is that people aren't automatically classed as sinners because of what Adam did; to be a sinner in the Mormon faith you actually have to be bad). If only other religions could take these two teachings to heart!

Outside we witnessed a young couple getting married, and by young I mean younger than me. This was something I noticed at the zoo; we were surrounded by young mothers with one, two, or more children in prams, and usually another clearly on its way. And most looked our age or younger! We've all seen the sights in Chch of a frumpy looking mother and her toe-rag children waiting at the bus stop ready to wreck havoc, but here in SLC they mothers aren't frumpy, and the children are little angels. I strongly suspect it's due to the 50%+ of Utah that is Mormon. We noticed it at the aquarium too; lots and lots of young mothers. And so here a the Temple it wasn't surprising to see a young couple getting married.

(Notice how young the boy at right looks)

Outside of the square we spied a massive skyscraper going up, resplendent in all sorts of day-glo shades of building paper, and I spied a few street-trains.

Then we caught the shuttle back, wowed at the guy from Las Vegas who was wearing a jacket and not sweating (in fact he thought it was pleasantly cool!) and had a very healthy American dinner of soft drink and burgers from Carl Jr, whatever that is. This was to be our final night in SLC, and I was about ready for a new destination; much as I love trains, hearing the LONG LONG SHORT LONG crossing blasts every 10 minutes throughout the night wore off pretty quick! It was time to explore the real Utah.