Since members of the church are encouraged to do missionary work, some of them are assigned to Temple Square to work as tour guides. In the Visitors’ Center, there were many of them from different countries and the tour guides we got happened to be from Canada and USA.

The guides took us to the top of the North Visitors’ Center to show us an 11-foot tall statue of Jesus (picture from Wikipedia). While up there, the guides played a short audio clip about Jesus’s purpose and told us about their beliefs. Even though I’m not Christian, it was clear that they were quite devout and dedicated and such qualities are definitely admirable.

Next, the guides took us to the Salt Lake Tabernacle to see the pipe organ.

Then the guides asked us, “how many pipes do you think there are?” Me, not knowing anything about organs, merely counted the ones I saw on the surface and naively said, “maybe about 30”. It turns out I was off by several orders of magnitude. The answer: 11,623.

The building was built to house meetings for the church and was used for the LDS General Conference, but the church grew so large, that the occupant capacity of the building was exceeded. After that tour ended, we visited the newer and larger conference center.

We got a tour of the inside and it was massive with 21,000 seats. We were told that to play the church organ, the organist would have to have a PhD in that field.

The roof of the building had a beautiful view of the Temple Square and had a nice garden full of many varieties of plants.

Lastly, there is the temple itself. Unfortunately, it is not open to the public as it is sacred and there are strict entrance requirements. But at least it looks nice on the outside!

That concluded our tour of the Temple Square in Salt Lake City and then we made our way to the airport and flew back to Vancouver.

Link to more photos

The most interesting thing I experienced here would have to be the ridiculous portions of food that is served – it really fulfills the American stereotype. For example, this is what we got at the restaurant at the Star Hotel:

Now a standard fork is probably about 7 inches in length, so using the fork as a scale in that picture, the steak is probably about 9 inches long and about 2.5 inches wide. I was expecting a steak of half the size. Not to mention it came with spaghetti, beans, fries, soup, salad, and bread on the side. I ate all of that over two meals.

Naturally, we also explored the town. The road we mostly travelled through was Idaho Street and we really saw how small the town was. When we were there, the temperature was about 30°C and not very humid, making it very unpleasant to walk outside.

According to Wikipedia, Elko had a population of 18,297 people in 2010 – that’s pretty small compared to what I’m used to. The primary industry in Elko is gold mining – hence the reason to hold a tradeshow. The tradeshow lasted two days and after that we drove to Salt Lake City to catch a plane back to Vancouver.

Link to more photos