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SPRING BREAK!!!
Salt Lake City 

Outside the Mormon tabernacle in a snowstorm.

After spending the better part of the day with Emily at BYU, we went up to Salt Lake City for the afternoon to visit temple square, the center of the Mormon faith.  Along with the visitor centers, there was the tabernacle and temple to check out.  We were greeted at the front gate by two guides who had came up from South America for their mission.  They both barely spoke english, but they were really kind and patient with our questions, and open about their faith.

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This is up in one of the visitors centers... Jesus  in the heavens.

This above statue was in the main visitors center, and the mural around it is of the planets and the stars.  As we sat there, we listened to a recording of someone speaking as Jesus about the world from a Mormon perspective.  Just to humor us, they played the recording again in Mandarin, which sounded pretty funny.  The visitors center also had a scale model of the old Jerusalem from the time of Jesus, that was pretty cool.  Then we watched a movie about how Joseph Smith, one of their early prophets, came to the Mormon faith.  The film had to have been 30 years old, everyone looked like they were from the seventies.  

These two were on a mission to give us a tour.

Below is a picture of the holy Mormon temple.  We weren't allowed to enter because in addition to being Mormon, one also has to go through some cleansing rituals or something.  But from the outside, it was pretty impressive.  It looked especially cool with those ominous clouds in the background.

This is the temple.  We aren't allowed to go in there.

While we weren't able to enter the temple, they did let us into the tabernacle.  They told us when it was built, the pioneers only had access to white pine, so they had to specially craft each piece of the building to look like something else.  Each of the thousands of bells pictured here was really white pine, painted to look like it was brass.  Each of the pews was hand painted so that the grain of the wood would look like oak.  Each pillar was painted to resemble marble.  It was pretty amazing, frankly.  After our tour we came back to the tabernacle to here the Mormon Tabernacle Choir practice for their performance the next night.  They were an absolutely amazing choir, I really wish I had the chance to hear them for a whole service or something.

The world-renowned Mormon tabernacle choir.

I have to admit, I came to Utah with some bad preconceptions about Mormons.  Going to temple square and hanging out with Emily and her friends really changed that, and I am grateful.