Once we get into sight of the city, we turn off the iPod and start flipping through the radio. It's whole lot of talk, some country, some church, some Latino. "And the number one best thing about November..." Tumbleweed hits scan.
"No, put it back! I wanna hear the best thing about November."
She turns it back in time for us to hear "...family sweater night. Put on those sweaters and save on the heating bills. I'm Donnie Osmond for..." But we miss the rest because we're all cracking up. Family sweater night? What does that even mean?
I feel more of an East-Coaster than I ever do here. Hell, I didn't even know that living in one side of the country had a feeling.
But Salt Lake City will learn me about planning to spend a whole day in a city without making any concrete plans about what to do there. There's a mentality that I had based on places I'd been previous, of that in a city, there's something to see always, a main drag to walk down, a populated waterfront. Failing that, at least a museum of some kind. Even if I'm surrounded by mediocrity, some dusty spurs or a meteorite fragment might spark some interest. But Salt Lake City isn't made for the casual browser.
It's an entirely car-based city set up on a grid. No main drag to stroll down. No pockets of interesting sights created with the pedestrian in mind. Something always strikes me weird about planned cities like this. It lacks the element of the accidental.
A perusal of a guide given to me by a chatty fellow hostel-stayer doesn't shed that much more light on what to do. After I come back with it, Butterscotch says "new rule, no one goes anywhere alone. Otherwise, for all we know, you'll have come back converted."
"You're talking about it like we're in The Thing." I snort. I don't get corrected.
Not that we didn't try to ask locals what to see. As soon as we saw there was a coffee place next to the hostel called Mormon coffee, we knew where we were going to get our morning's fix. We ask our barista, a young lady with a nose ring, so hip, we assume, the must-sees of Salt Lake City.
"Oh you should go see Temple Square now that there's finally a snow down."
One of the first things that we saw upon driving into the city the night before were the huge spires of the Mormon temple at the center of town. Around it there are a couple of visitors centers, and plenty of people willing to explain to you the wonder of their church square. The visitors centers come in sort of handy, because as we find out from an old man watching a wedding party exit the Temple (featuring a heartbreakingly young-looking bride and groom) we aren't allowed in the church because we aren't Mormons.
Judging by the model of the temple we saw in the visitors center and the artwork inside there, we aren't exactly missing the Sistine Chapel. When you walk in there's a wall-length painting depicting scenes from a proper Mormon life, weddings, family dinners, deathbeds, cemetaries, playing with children, all that. When walking past it, I have to abruptly speed past to keep from breaking into nervous hysterical laughter when I hear the guide say, "I like this painting, because even though there's like sad stuff, people are happy too." As Tumbleweed puts it, never heard anyone older than about 7 talk like that.
Okay, this is going to sound shitty, I know, but when the tour guides walk up to us, big wide smiles on their faces, American flags on their chest, pleasantries cued up behind their lips, some part of my brain screams "pod people!"
Because I know that hidden beneath that smile, and that temple that looks like a Disneyfied version of a Gothic Cathedral is the church that was the major sponsor of Proposition 8, that wouldn't let black people in until 1978, claiming that they were descended from Noah's disgraced son Ham, and if we're going to be honest, only outlawed polygamy in order to gain admission to the United States. Hey, not that I'm necessarily defending it as a belief, but it's not entirely dignified to, after the dozenth time a country won't let you in due to your illegal practices, to suddenly look at your scriptures again and go "Well, looky here, guess we never said we had to practice polygamy after all."
Feel like it's a hell of a dilution from the Puritans you know? Traveling across an ocean because they felt persecuted by a church and state that didn't let them be as all fired strict as they wanted to be. On to a group traveling across a continent because they felt persecuted by a church and state that didn't let them have a couple of wives instead of just the one.
And I guess it's easier to see the faults of a church magnified once they actively run a government. And when they have a creepy statue garden in the middle of their city that has Joseph Smith's head on the body of a sphinx. Okay, that was kind of awesome.
After seeing a pretty awful movie. Catfish. Bleh. We decide to go bowling, then cook a dinner in the hostel. And we made Salt Lake City cool.
But before we did what we could to improve on it, we were driving around, not knowing what to do, past pawn shops, boarded store fronts and concrete mini-mall looking churches, this got voted our jam, so here it is.
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