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we arrived at “the bikehouse” near downtown Salt Lake City (SLC) at about 9pm on sunday night. shane was there waiting for us and immediately gave us a tour of the house. there was the workshop (for work on bikes and such), shane’s room, the living room / wood stove room / kitchen, the back kitchen, the other personal rooms upstairs and downstairs, and the treehouse in the backyard. with a total of eight roommates, it still did not seem crowded, and was homey and warm.

the rest of the night we just hung out there and unloaded some of our things. meredith and i were pretty tired and ended up going to sleep around midnight.

the next morning we woke up and headed out for the SLC tour at 9:30. our first stop was Sage’s Cafe where we were gonna eat breakfast. it was closed until 11, so we bypassed that for the time being and went straight to the public library, and it was absolutely beautiful.

from the outside it was amazingly monumental with angles and curves coming and going in all directions. covered in thick glass, it reflected and accepted light from the sun beautifully. we went inside on the ground level and walked around and saw some of the shops (yes, there were shops inside the library). from there we went up the glass elevator to the top floor and went outside on the roof where we got to see a wonderful view of most of downtown. one of the architectural features of the building aloud us to walk down small sets of stairs spaced by level cement all the way to ground level. we went back inside and went to the bottom level where the children’s area was located. it had amazing natural light covering the entire area (even in the basement) with sail-like moveable shades hung above. there were also very cool reading nooks with two different themes: the attic and the ice cave. aside from these cool architectural features were other small details that made me smile: inspirational quotes on the bathroom mirrors (my fav: “we do not see things as they are, we see things as we are”), hand rails on the stairs at three levels (including a low one for kids), an entire section the library devoted to zines (yeah, zines). on the way out we stumbled into one more awesome touch: a bike rack that spelled the words “bike rack.”

from there we went back to sage’s to eat. it is a vegan/raw restaurant that shane eats at quite a bit, mainly because he always knows someone who is working there. it was great. meredith and i shared a philly cheeze steak sandwich and a strawberry shake, and shane had bruschetta. our belly’s full we headed downtown to see what shane calls “space jesus.”

i was unaware at how much of SLC is populated by Mormons. the number i heard thrown around was 90%. can you believe that? 90% of population of that city follows one religion and the entire government is composed of mormons and many of the laws in the city correspond to that directly. until recently, SLC was officially the Mecca of the Mormons, or “The New Zion.” there is a large section of downtown that is completely devoted to buildings of the mormon church, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints (LDS). First we went to the south visitor’s center. there was a history of the mass exodus of the mormons from somewhere in illinois to SLC, the establishment of the city, and all sorts of other history.

there was a small section here devoted to children, and one of the resources were some videos of children answering common questions. there were viewing screens and touch screens. if you touched a question on the touch screen (e.g. “who is god?”) then some adorable children answered the question on the viewing screen. one of the questions that meredith happened to click on was “what happens when we die?”, and the girl that answered that question was so hilarious that we taped it. enjoy. we watched and re-watched that video about 5 times and then headed to the north visitor’s center.

there we saw a massive miniature model of jerusalem (AD 33) that i couldn’t get enough of. you could touch metal plates with names of them (the grave, the blad, etc) and a spotlight from above would light that area on the model. next was Space Jesus! really, it is almost impossible to explain how amazing it was in words. i’ll try and then you can look at the pictures and the videos i’ve included here: a 12-foot tall statue of jesus that talks to you in about 8 languages that is surrounded by a planetarium like painting of space, with landmarks like the earth and saturn and other galaxies. wow!

the final stop on the tour was the convention center, which is an epic auditorium that seats 21,000 people and is mainly used twice a year for the great gathering of LDS from all over the world. apparently something 30,000+ people show up to SLC and worship for one day (the 1st sunday in april and in october). we also went on the roof of this building that had huge gardens and praries with large pine trees.

we took the train back to shane’s place and got in some much need RnR. it was about 5pm then and by that time we had planned on going out to eat at P.F. Chang’s for dinner that night. meredith and i laid around and read books and did su doku and went next door to Boing (the bikehouse sister house across the street) to use the internet. there was a show there that night and we were there waiting for it when our ride arrived to take us out to eat. our party ended up being 9 people, all of which were friends of shane. we came home, watched Off the Map, and the crashed for the night.

the next day was less active. we slept in ’til 1pm, and didn’t actually set out for the day until about 2. we went back to the library where meredith checked her email and read, while shane and i did some work on zinedistro. we are building it with an entirely new language in an entirely new framework (ruby on rails), but we got the startup-hard-stuff out of the way and are starting to get something accomplished. it exciting.

the library activity was done with around 6:30 and we got back to the house around 7:30 after stopping to get a new air mattress (the other one leaked the night before). we just stopped off for a second, grabbed a few others, and went back to sage’s for dinner. back at the bikehouse, we watched a few episodes of the 2nd season of LOST, went to boing to check our email, shane went 80s dancing with a few of his friends, meredith and i set up the air mattress for bed, lied down to sleep, got stepped on by some other roommates arriving home late (hilarious!), moved to shane’s room for the night so he could sleep on the air mattress when he got home, woke up the next morning at 6 and left by 7.

we are somewhere in the middle of Nevada right now, stopping to get gas and subway. hopefully we will make it to elaine’s by 9pm tonight so we can catch the new episode of LOST.