Yes, today I feel like I'm in a very prophetic mood!
And after all, why shouldn't I been after spending the whole day visiting Salt Lake City's most famous square, Temple Square!
We left the hotel this morning around 10AM after deciding that we wanted to spend another extra night here in Salt Lake City, UT at the Ramada hotel, very nice and cozy rooms, coupled with an extremely professional and helpful staff. The Sales Manager for this Salt Lake City location, Mrs. Susan Green, has been so helpful and nice with us when we asked about winter packages, I wanted to publicly thank her for her help. She is also “family” to me, as we share the same passion for traveling, developing new products, and therefore simply try to make customers as happy as possible in their travel experience.
So, there we went, out and about to tour the city's most important downtown area, which I’ve been told is basically what “The Vatican” is for Catholics.
They have volunteers (missionaries) that take the visitors on different tours in and around Temple Square every 15 minutes, it’s amazing the amount of people that they decided to devote to this service to the public, and I was also pleasantly surprised by the amount of young people who are members of LDS.
In our first tour we visited the Beehive House, which was Brigham Young’s family residence, and then after a nice guided tour of the house (with some preaching), we joined other people at the South Gate for a visit of the Tabernacle.
This is a front view of the Beehive House:
And this is a flower I took a picture of in the garden in front of the house (they certainly have a green thumb!):
And this is the Lion House, next door to the Beehive house:
Luckily enough, at noon, by the time we got there, they had a Organ rehearsal that we really enjoyed (but maybe our friend Bob Bury would have enjoyed it more, considering he’s part of the club!). The Organ is magnificent, but what impressed me the most was its size, because, even from a distance, it looks huge!
The organ has more than 11,000 pipes, and the Tabernacle has been built in such a way that the acoustic is simply unbelievable.
Here’s a view of the Tabernacle’s Organ:
After that we visited the LDS Main Office Building where visitors can take another free tour and go up to the 26th floor to enjoy a magnificent view of the Salt Lake City area. I took some nice pictures of the Square down below, the Utah State Capital, and our next building on the free tour, the LDS Convention Center, another quite impressive brand new structure that holds an arena like theater that holds up to 21,000 people!
Here’s a picture of the square from the 26th Floor:
A picture of the State Capital:
A picture of the Convention Center:
Speaking of the Convention Center, we did have another free tour in there, when a very friendly guy approached us and took us straight on a tour (with other three people) of the facility.
And this is the organ of the main auditorium in the Convention Center:
What I really felt here in Salt Lake City among LDS members is the sense of family and community that they have between them, but that they also project on the outside to people that come to visit from other parts of the world. They are so friendly that at times I must admit it they cross the imaginary border into creepiness! But they are very nice indeed, I’m only kidding about them being creepy, I should just probably say that I’m certainly not used to such treatment from people I have never met, that’s for sure.
The highlight for An Italian Across America today has probably been the two hours spent at the Genealogical Society Of Utah, that helps people from all over the world to find their ancestors.
I haven’t been able to trace my family roots as I wanted to, but it was my fault, I don’t know anything about my great-grandparents, and I needed something from before 1910 to start a research.
I’ve been very helpful to Hap’s research, as together we traced his family back to the 1850s in England first, and then the USA. Two hours went away just like two seconds, and again, the LDS members inside the center couldn’t have been more helpful.
We had dinner at another Brazilian Steakhouse this evening, not as nice as the other one we visited yesterday, but still very good, with an extremely friendly staff serving us. It was a much more relaxed atmosphere, and certainly the price was more than right.
On our way back to the Hotel we took a drive with the top down throughout the city, and Capitol Hill, where I’ve been able to take some nice pictures of the State House; here’s one for you to enjoy:
Our final destination will still be Twin Falls, ID, we will be going west on I-80 from Salt Lake City, UT so that we will hit the Bonneville Salt Flats, and hopefully we will be able to take some cool pictures on the Salt Flats.
And for those of you who like to know interesting facts about the places we’re visiting, think about the fact that the Bonneville Salt Flats are so “flat” that you can see the curvature of the planet!
For more information I strongly encourage you to visit the following website:
http://www.utah.com/playgrounds/bonneville_salt.htm
Have a good night everybody,
Nico
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