As we already know, Utah is the biggest habitat for followers of the Mormon Church and Salt Lake City as the capital of Utah does the same job for the church. The centre of the city is characterized by the Temple Square with an enormous concert hall and a temple for weddings, which is not open for the public (we saw two brides within 10 minutes). In addition, there is the most impressive building in the city, the conference centre. The church owns a lot of real estate in the city centre, a huge mall is only one example. It’s quite tricky to deal with Mormons, as they are really nice and friendly, but also very missionary, why it’s common to get into a discussion about the church. The quite annoying part is, that these discussions are more about the church and its charitable work, rather than the religion. Other than that, the complete “history” about the church is a lie. They say, after the Resurrection, Jesus came to America in order to convert the Indians which was the start of the religion. If you search for 5 minutes in google, you will find out the true story, which is the complete opposite. But the leaders of the church are not stupid, why it’s forbidden to do research about the church if you’re a true supporter of the church. Knowing that, the structure of the church is downright ridiculous for common sense. The president (or how he calls himself, prophet) is “appointed by god” who appoints the 12 apostels…
However, each to his own, we thought, and arrived at our host Mike (hoping he wouldn’t be Mormon 🙂 ). Fortunately he isn’t, what was clear after he made some jokes about them. Again, super nice and relaxed. After a bit of chatting, he gave us some hints for the next two days and we went to bed early (that is to say on our couch and hammock 🙂 )
We visited one of the venues of the Olympic Games 2002 the next day. The surroundings of Salt Lake City are apparently a very famous winter sport location. We visited Park City, which hosted ski jumping, skeleton and bobbing and we could even watch trainings for freestyle skiing into a pool of water. We also watched some super adventurous people sliding down a crazy zip line (beware of sarcasm) and couldn’t resist doing a free gondola ride. We visited some winter sport exhibitions in the museums they have there and drove back to Salt Lake City after having lunch in order to go to the already described Temple Square. First, we listened to an organ concert in an oval building with an amazing acoustic. However, the room made the organ unbearable loud (and the artist was definitely not a genius) that we escaped after the second “track”. After that we went to the Family History Museum (which apparently has the largest collection of ancestor research documents in the world), where you can search for your ancestors for hours. They had some examples of famous family trees, e.g. Churchill, Roosevelt, George W. Bush and Nixon share one ancestor in the 17th century.
We also participated a guided walk in the already mentioned conference building. It’s ridiculous, what a church does if they have too much money (compared to that, the Vatican is kind of sober). The main room, the conference hall, hosts 21.000 people without having a single pile in the room. The lighting partially comes from 12 (!!!) wells to the roof. The roof itself is more a park than a roof, having fountains, trees, plants and water falls. Somehow we had the feeling that most of the people working in the building are related to each-other (which obviously makes sense as the ideology of the church is to have as many children as possible…). When we visited a little exhibition in the nearby visitor centre, Kerstin almost got converted by two 19 year old girls, but fortunately she could rescue herself in the last second.
Mike invited us to join him and a friend of his to a pretty cool sports bar with amazing burgers! His friend was actually a former Mormon, why we know this stuff about their history. The next day we visited the probably most famous speedway in the world. As the name Salt Lake City implies, there are salt lakes around that area (actually it was one, but it evaporated and now there are a few “smaller” ones). The famous part evaporated centuries ago and left a few thousand km² big salt flat which dries out that much in summer, that one can drive a car on it. In late summer, they prepare a 10 mile speedway for approaching new high-speed records. In the evening we had a very American experiences, when we drove to a softball match of Mike. We couldn’t resist cheering a bit, it was so funny! So after another very nice evening with cocktails later, we said good bye to Mike the next morning and drove, with a shorter stopover on Antelope Island (where we could see antelopes and bisons), to the next highlight of America, Yellowstone!