April 25 - 2018 Draper, Utah

As JJ wrote yesterday, we are now in the Salt Lake City area. We are very pleasantly surprised at how beautiful this area is. The city and surrounding towns are in a valley between 2 beautiful mountain ranges. So… there are going to be more mountain pictures coming on the blog. We can’t help ourselves😊

Yesterday, while JJ was at the optometrist, I was talking to one of the employees. She gave us a great tip, about an open house tour, being held at the Jordan River Utah Temple. It is a Mormon temple, that has been remodeled (ombygget), and before the dedication ceremony (indvielsen) on May 19, people from the general public are invited to see it. (Once a temple is dedicated, only Mormons can enter.)
We were excited about this, because we are very interested in the history and culture of the Mormons.

We were not disappointed when we visited today (April 25). The temple was VERY different than any place of worship we have ever been in. We learned that all Mormons have a church they belong to. This is a place like other Christian churches, where the members meet on Sundays for services.

The temple is quite different. It is made up of many rooms of varying size and purpose (forskellige størelser og formål). All of them are beautifully decorated. We especially noticed the paintings and lighting.

Lounges/sitting areas

There are many small offices and meeting rooms. There are larger rooms, called Instruction rooms, where people gather to be “endowed” (velsignet)with knowledge (viden) and spiritual power (åndlig styrke).

There are rooms for weddings – called Sealing rooms. “Sealing” a marriage is a very important thing in the Mormon church. They are very family orientated and believe that marriage not only lasts “until death do we part”, but also into life everlasting (evig liv). There were 16 sealing rooms – varying in capacity size from 15 to 150.



This is a dressing room for the bride.

There are also MANY other dressing rooms. People participating in ceremonies at the temple – baptism, weddings, instruction - wear white robes. We saw rooms with hundreds of robes hanging, and we saw hundreds of changing rooms.

There is a room for baptism (dåb) – called the Baptistry. Mormons have full body baptism. They also have a tradition, that we find strange. They can be baptized for family members, who are dead. They believe that the souls of the dead, still have a will (vilje), and can still gain eternal life (liv efter døden), through the acts of people still alive. So, the living is baptized in the dead's name, and then the dead person can choose to accept the baptism or not.

The room that looked most like the churches we know, was the chapel.

The most sacred (hellig) room in the temple is the Celestial (himmelisk) room. It is a place for quiet reflection and prayer, after you have participated (deltaget) in the other activities in the temple. We were not really supposed to take pictures on the tour, but we did. However, in the celestial room, we didn’t dare. It looked like many of the lounge areas, just bigger. And in the middle, the ceiling was very high, and there was a very large, bright chandelier hanging there.

The outside of the temple was also beautiful. It was made even more so, because of all the spring flowers, that were in bloom. It is spring in Salt Lake City! This is the first place where spring reminds us of the Danish spring. It is wonderful! We had a lot of days with “fall” last year, but this will probably be the only 3 days of “spring” we have, because soon we head south again – to warmer and drier weather.

It was good, that we enjoyed the temple so much. We were a little let down by our next 2 stops.

JJ’s brother, Per, had been to Salt Lake City some years ago, and he said we had to see the copper mine just outside of town. We were interested, so we drove out there. Unfortunately, the visitors center was closed (it had been ruined by a rock slide (stenskred) a few years ago), and no visitors were allowed on the site. We saw what we could from the road, but we were disappointed that we couldn’t see more.

We drove to the Great Salt Lake. We had heard from the locals, that it wasn’t much to see, and most of them didn’t go there often. But, we wanted to see it, since we are in the area. The locals were right! The lake itself is like any other big lake. I like water, so it was nice to see…from a distance. There were hundreds of small brine flies (små fluer på størrelse af bananfluer) all over the place, and they were very aggressive (they bite!!!!). So we took some quick pictures and left!

This afternoon, we drove up into the mountains. There are 2 valleys near our campground. There are several ski resorts in the valleys. It was a very nice drive. Here are some mountain pictures😊

Grey mountains - for a change

One of the ski resorts

Written by Mary